After the Eruption: A Reply to My Interlocutors

Abstract

Good interlocutors are a blessing, and needless to say, I’m feeling very blessed today. This is especially true for a project in which vision figures so centrally, since we often see most clearly through the parallax of another’s eyes. Contributors to this conversation have cast distinct lines of sight onto Anticolonial Eruptions that have allowed me to see both otherwise and better, to recognize which elements of my original argument remain incomplete or unclear, to glimpse what was overlooked or taken for granted, and to realize other moments where I might have been wrong entirely. They have revealed how my book, despite diagnosing colonial hubris, might reproduce blindspots that are more or less hubristic in their own right. This apparent irony is anything but. Any book, especially one this short, slices into and across history and theory ways that are inescapably partial, leaving a generative remainder to be dealt with. But more than this, I find nothing but encouragement in how my comrade-readers have taken up the lenses provided—the colonial blindspot, the second sight of the colonized, and the decolonial ambush—to excavate and cultivate a radical second sight from the depths of the colonial blindspot. Whether diagnosing the paradoxical unseeing of ocular-centrism, my own blindness toward the revolutionary nature of care as community resistance, or the ways that tropes of inevitability might refract my political judgment, each of the critiques printed above offers, in Kevin Bruyneel’s words, “more ammo for the canon/cannon” (88).