There is a strong parallel between discourse on progress and settler colonialism. The drive to expand and occupy the land is often accompanied by the thought of a linear time in which history progresses toward a singular telos. Might the energy that fuels settler colonialism, ancient and present, be also the drive for settling the future?
This panel invites contributions that challenge notions of linear, progressive time and invite us to reflect on future thinking as an invitation to imagine alternative futures. Such perspectives challenge dominant and oppressive futures driven by extraction, settler colonialism, and capitalist accumulation. As many scholars and activists have suggested, nonhegemonic religious communities and Indigenous traditions offer alternative ways of conceiving of temporality. Here, future thinking is not necessarily an act of imagination oriented towards a time ahead of us, but a way of imagining and demanding a different time, a different form of relating to the past, to the ancestors, and, ultimately, a different way of inhabiting the present moment.
Some people are allowed to have a future--a linear destiny with a definite end--in order to be ends in themselves; they may be defined as such in contrast to those denied a future. This selective wielding of futurity is one tool of the settler-colonialism and racialized oppression of what I call the “Master’s Temporality.” A liberative theology of indigenous and land-based futures is uniquely challenged to disrupt these temporal norms without replicating their systems of exclusion. Doing so requires eschewing telos in favor of immanent ambiguity.
With the interdisciplinary scholars of the More Worlds Collective, I will argue that any movement toward liberative futurity must fully disavow mastery. My aim without aim is an anti-telic liberative theology of time based in embodiment rather than transcendence.
When theology considers Indigenous perspectives at all, it almost always looks to the past. But Indigenous people, organizations, and governance systems are always also looking to our collective futures. Society, and churches, often do not have the ears to hear the liberative wisdom that comes from Indigenous circular concepts of time and the ways that past, present, and future are intricately woven together. This paper uses the main themes of Métis novelist Cheri Dimaline's celebrated young adult novel, The Marrow Thieves as a starting point for liberative Indigenous futurisms in service of the world and all our relations.
Given the creativity, resilience, and the epistemic privilege of Indigenous Peoples as those with views from the underside of modernity, what world-building can Indigenous fiction and scholarship offer us, for such a time as this?
This paper reflects on a scene from within the struggles for social and racial justice in a far-reaching social movement in Latin America’s pacific region. The scene shows a vernacular enactment of law in the site of a funeral ceremony for a dear departed leader, in which a messianic temporality appears within a juridically oriented activism formed in the impulse, and collective memory, of a theology of liberation. This theopolitical dimension disturbs and challenges the linear temporality of State law and gives us valuable resources to reassess the complex relation to the State in social movements such as this one. People here enact in their daily practices of grassroots organizing, and of collective mourning, a vernacular law that exceeds the State form and challenges its technique of time framing, while performing a mimetic attachment to its bureaucratic grammar. It is necessary to see in this desire of State law, a law otherwise that is religious in a way that deserves careful attention and consideration.
Brazil can be considered an experiment in colonial ecology. One of the contemporary events that confirms the afterlives of the ancestral catastrophe of colonization and demonstrates the traumatic repetition of environmental catastrophe related to this extractivist model of social construction is the land subsidence of entire neighborhoods in the city of Maceió, capital of the state of Alagoas, in northeastern Brazil. In this eschatological scenario, a Baptist church rooted in the Northeastern tradition of Brazilian Liberation Theology has led efforts to resist, repair, and promote ecological justice in the face of the systemic violence caused by mining.
Analyzing photographic and ethnographic records of the ruins of the catastrophe from an eco-hauntological perspective, this article aims to demonstrate how the struggles for social and environmental justice articulated by Pinheiro's Church dismantle the disciplinary regimes of capitalist temporalities that devastated territories, populations, biodiversity, spiritualities, and ancestral ways of life in Brazil.