Joyful Militancy. Carla Bergman

really hard one. It was used a lot in Filipino organizing. I would always connect it to the military industrial complex, and I didn’t want to replicate that. And then as I started peeling back the actual things we need to do…. As an Asian woman, to be militant—that’s really fucking rad. It breaks down sterotypes of submissiveness. The concept of militancy is a new thing for me, and to embrace it I’m unpacking notions of who I’m supposed to be.24

      Artist and writer Jackie Wang argues that militancy is not only tactically necessary but also transformative for those who embody it. In the context of anti-Blackness in the United States, Wang shows how the category of “crime” has been constructed around Blackness and how mass incarceration has led to a politics of safety and respectability that relies on claims of innocence, contrasted implicitly with (Black) guilt and criminality. Rejecting the politics of innocence means challenging the innocent/criminal dichotomy and the institutionalized violence that subtends it. This form of militancy, Wang argues, is “not about assuming a certain theoretical posture or adopting a certain perspective—it is a lived position.”25 Drawing on Frantz Fanon, Wang writes that militancy has the capacity “to transform people and ‘fundamentally alter’ their being by emboldening them, removing their passivity and cleansing them of the ‘core of despair’ crystallized in their bodies.”26 Living militancy, from this perspective, is inherently connected to a process of transformation that undoes the knot of subjection around innocence, challenges the carceral logics of anti-Blackness, and opens up new terrains of struggle.

      When we asked Indigenous political theorist Glen Coulthard about his conception of militancy in the context of Indigenous resurgence, he called it an “emergent radicalism” that destabilizes relations of domination.27 Coulthard’s work focuses on Indigenous resurgence and resistance to settler colonialism. He reveals the ways that Empire represents Indigenous peoples’ oppression as a constellation of personal failings and “issues” to be addressed through colonial recognition and reconciliation. He also focuses on Indigenous refusal and resistance, the revaluation of Indigenous traditions, and a rise in Indigenous militancy and direct action. Militancy, in the context of Indigenous resurgence, is about the capacity to break down colonial structures of control, including the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force; it is a break with the colonial state’s attempt to subjugate Indigenous people and ensure continued exploitation of Indigenous lands. This emergent militancy isn’t based on a single program or ideology but comes out of relationships. As Coulthard says:

      It’s emergent in the sense that it’s bottom-up. But it also emerges from something… those relationships to land, place, community. So that is the emergent part. Emergent doesn’t mean entirely new, because those relationships to place are not new. They’ve always been there and are always re-emerging. It comes in cycles. The always-there emergent militancy is acted on through management strategies, recognition and accommodation, whatever. That has its effects: it dampens the crisis; it overcomes contradictions temporarily. And then the militancy will emerge again. And we’ve seen this four or five times in the last half-century, these series of containment/management strategies…

      What’s always prior is agency of Indigenous peoples, and capital and the state are constantly on the defensive, reacting. As opposed to thinking that we’re always reacting to colonialism when we privilege it. It’s this resurgent Indigenous subjectivity that the state is constantly trying to quell or subdue. And it’s successful but never totally successful. And it boils over, comes to the surface, and some new technology is deployed in order to manage it, and reconciliation is the latest tool that is doing that work. But it’s always because of our persistent presence: we’ve never gone away, and we’ve been articulating alternatives in words and deeds.28

      This conception of militancy as emergent is important because it doesn’t come out of thin air or from an enlightened vanguard of militarized men who suppose that they can see things more clearly than common people. It comes out of the ongoing refusal of Indigenous peoples to give up their ways of life. As Kiera Ladner and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson write in their introduction to This Is an Honour Song,

      The summer of 1990 brought some strong medicine to Turtle Island. For many Canadians, “Oka” was the first time they encountered Indigenous anger, resistance and standoff, and the resistance was quickly dubbed both the “Oka Crisis” and the “Oka Crises” by the mainstream media. But to the Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) people of Kanehsatà:ke, who were living up to their responsibilities to take care of their lands, this was neither a “crisis” at Oka, nor was it about the non-Native town of “Oka.” This was about 400 years of colonial injustice. Similarly, for the Kanien’kehaka from Kahnawà:ke and Akwesasne who created “crises” by putting up their own barricades on the Mercier Bridge or by mobilizing and/or mobilizing support (resources) at Kanehsatà:ke, this really had nothing to do with Oka, a bridge or a golf course. This was about 400 years of resistance. Like every Indigenous nation occupied by Canada, the Haudenosaunee have been confronting state/settler societies and their governments since those societies began threatening the sovereignty, self-determination, and jurisdiction of the Haudenosaunee. It was not a beginning. Nor was this the end. This was a culmination of many, many years of Onhkwehonwe resistance resulting in a decision to put up barricades in defense of, and to bring attention to, Haudenosaunee land ethics, treaty responsibilities, and governance.29

      Indigenous resurgence and events like Oka are not joyful in the sense of being happy but in the sense that they are deeply transformative and able to catalyze solidarity across Turtle Island. But unlike Marxist conceptions of militancy in which the vanguard is supposed to usher in a global revolution, it is clear that Indigenous struggles do not implicate everyone in the same way. As it breaks down colonial structures of control and dispossession, Indigenous resurgence implicates us, as settlers, in complicated ways: it unsettles us and our relationship to land and place, and it throws into question received ideas about who we are, our responsibilities and complicities, what it means to live here, and our received ideas about what “here” is. It compels us to learn, together, how to support Indigenous resurgence and resist settler colonial violence.

      Joyful militancy has also emerged in spaces where people generate the capacity to move with despair and hopelessness, to politicize it. In her study of the queer movement ACT UP, queer theorist and activist Deborah Gould shows how its militant tactics not only won institutional victories that prolonged and saved lives; it was also a process of world-making:

      From its start and throughout its life, ACT UP was a place to fight the AIDS crisis, and it was always more than that as well. It was a place to elaborate critiques of the status quo, to imagine alternative worlds, to express anger, to defy authority, to form sexual and other intimacies, to practice non-hierarchical governance and self-determination, to argue with one another, to refashion identities, to experience new feelings, to be changed.30

      The militancy of ACT UP was not only about a willingness to be confrontational and defy conventions of straight society and mainstream gay and lesbian politics; the movement also created erotically charged queer atmospheres and sustained networks of care and support for members who got sick. Catalyzed by grief and rage, it blew open political horizons and changed what was possible for people to think, do, and feel together.

      When we asked the Argentina-based intellectual Sebastián Touza about militancy, he discussed the danger of defining it once and for all: