Decolonising ‘A No Borders Manifesto’
Date:
Saturday June 29th
Venue: City of Edinburgh Methodist Church,
NIcholson Square
Accessibility: Physically accessible, contact
eafb@riseup.net for more information
Childcare: Book your space
here
Directions/Travel: Detailed information
here
Introductory talk by Dania Thomas of
Ubuntu Women Shelter and the
Unity Centre, followed by a practical
hands on session aimed at generating alternative ‘no borders’ narratives informed by the lived experience of the hostile environment.
The
‘no-borders manifesto’ we uncritically rely on in our activism and define our strategic intervention with the state is defined by the violence of sustaining state borders, though it is necessary to keep this violence in sight at all times we overlook:
- the sustaining and nurturing resistance to and redefinition of borders in our everyday lives and practical politics, and
- our own complicity in perpetuating violence and exploitation through unconscious acts of everyday racism and gender violence.
This talk argues that the ‘no borders manifesto’ that we adopt reinforces centuries of colonial erasure of lived experience and as such hardwires white saviour and white guilt. This hardwiring is evidenced as a focus on political borders which overlooks centuries of institutional sedimentation to facilitate the unimpeded flows of financial capital to the ‘global north’ extracting value from the ‘global south’. These unimpeded flows have re-configured political borders, what we see in our work is evidence of only one border – ‘a border’ between the rich and the poor- the underclass – the invisible (‘the illegal migrant’) and the strategically visible (‘the asylum-seeker’ and ‘the good migrant’). In our
work we engage with whole universes of possibility, ferment, creativity and care at
capital’s border between ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ labour. At this border, the most pressing practical problem we face relates to representing strategic invisibility. In this hands-on
discussion we hope to engender activist strategies to re-direct resource flows that sustain, celebrate and politicize strategic invisibility as practical support.
