Glossary

Abolition is a re-envisioning of the world already under way. The forms of care and community defense that emerge in making another world possible: one without police, prisons, and punishment. We cite the ways that abolition as a cause against the institution of slavery and is therefore informed deeply by both Black study and practices of fugitive planning and mutual aid. In the afterlives of plantation slavery, abolition remains the call. 

Anti-colonial acknowledges the antagonism always already present; that there is no post for the formerly and presently colonized. Such acknowledgement is not symbolic or metaphoric; instead, we take heed from anti-colonial writings that argue for nothing short of decolonization, a forceful call for land back by any means necessary. The anti-colonial is a reminder to center the calls of the Native and the Indigenous, never the settler or occupier.

Collectivity is how we gather, how we come together in the face of constant hyper-individualist impulses brought on by late-stage capitalism. It is via the virtual, the protest, the meeting, the organizing, the community-building, all necessary in whatever forms they may occur. It is the belief that we are interdependent and constantly in relation. Opacity is not a means to isolate, but a means to see each other differently, anew, and to build with.

There is no perfect form: the book, song, poem, anthology, zine, chapbook, podcast, PDF. Yet, there is a belief in the digital’s incapacity to reproduce the haptic possibilities of ephemera in the form of material, paper, for example, or the specificity of audio captured on vinyl. Even still, we see the digital’s capacity for capaciousness and evolving possibility as one place in which to deposit ephemera otherwise.

Internationalism is the Bandung conference of 1955, of Afro-Asian solidarity, of a building of a world in which the global majority recognizes its power towards decolonization. It is a recognition amongst Black and Brown peers that struggles in Asia, Africa, Abya Yala, Palestine, the Caribbean, and the Pacific are interrelated struggles against Western white supremacy. In out definition, internationalism is necessarily anti-colonial, intersectional, and militant.

Nazar is an amulet or talisman that is known across global Islam to ward off the evil eye. The evil eye is a way of rendering the gaze in all of its potential for harm, all of its potential violence. It is structured by the logics of sight that see the gaze as greedy, envious, desiring what it sees for forms of labor, exploitation, extraction, and dispossession. We ward off the evil eye, too, as we ward off the surveillance state: because we are wary of cops and colonizers.

Opacity is everything: under the heed of darkness, opacity is broadly understood as a tactic of the state. But if we use this tool otherwise and against the ongoing call for representation, how can opacity be understood as a strategy for the minoritarian and the wretched of the earth? Via the illegible, the inscrutable, the unknowable, the impenetrable, the dark, the abstract, the unclear, the private, the incoherent, and the opaque, we see the imperfections in service of another horizon. 

Solidarity is how we operate in this world, for each other, supporting those most in need and standing alongside them. When necessary, solidarity can also mean you protect those most targeted by the police state, acting as a front or barricade from violent fascist force. Solidarity is not a market exchange, as per Robin Kelley, we owe each other everything and it is not about the accumulation of debt to be repaid. Solidarity is a mandate that we stand with each other as a necessary and everyday practice.

Surveillance is a way of understanding the state and its enforcement of sight’s primacy. By way of the police and forms of policing and watchfulness, we must understand surveillance as a technology emerges to rival the omniscient eye. Such an eye was perfected in chattel slavery via the overseer, whose role through oversight helped shaped how we now understand surveillance’s role in the global afterlives of slavery. Given surveillance’s role in policing and punishment, we must reject its infiltration into the everyday.