Introduction: Inhuman Reparations — Translating Relations of Repair

Efforts to reckon with the afterlives of colonialism and slavery have multiplied in recent years with an extensive focus on reparations as a demonstrative and structural form of legal redress. In this special issue the authors consider the task of dismantling extensive and networked structures of harm by thinking across reparative frameworks grounded in multiple theoretical, spatial, legal, and material contexts. Centering the spatial and relational connections between epistemic violence and material realities, the authors consider how reparative discourses and practices involve translating repair across space-times, languages, epistemologies, and subjectivities. As the afterlives of slavery and colonialism cut across subjective, juridical, historical, and affective geographies, contributors to this special issue explore reparations through the concept of inhuman, which foregrounds both the inhumanism of colonial epistemes and the troubling past of the humanities in rendering subjective forms and relational geographies grounded in violent erasure. The papers shift attention to the spatial dynamics of reparations and engage the materiality of space in reparative work. They focus on the “where” as well as the “what” or “when” of reparations. Understanding reparative geographies as unquantifiable, and embedded in what Denise Ferrerira da Silva calls “unpayable debt,” the editors in this introduction to the special issue discuss the challenges of, and opportunities for, translating modes of repair and mechanisms of accounting/accountability across space-times. They argue that thinking and speaking across reparative languages allows for the emergence of new, extensive networks of repair that work against the re-instantiation of colonial imaginations and structures in what Kathryn Yusoff calls the “geophysics of race.” They suggest that this translational work petitions against the unliveability of colonial divisions of materiality that are continually resurfaced by environmental and climate change and ongoing racial violence. They argue that how material, territorial, and earthly sovereignty is constituted constitutes a medium of struggle over political identity and matters to how the geography must be engaged in reparative work.