Dyspossession: Notes on the Black Commons

In the abolitionist radical David Walker's 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, he offers an anecdote about the difficulties Black people in the United States have acquiring and keeping land:

Walker speaks to the potential liberatory value of land, hard-earned and deserved, if only Black people could keep it. Indeed, in the Black American imagination land ownership has often been viewed as the vehicle for a fully realized freedom. John Locke has famously written that a people deserve land if they use it for "industry": "As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property. He by his labor does, as it were, enclose it from the common." 2 Those who are not productive — according to Locke's European standards — are not worthy of owning it.

This is the underlying justification for settler colonialism and imperialism: the taking of land from the other, their subjugation and displacement, and in some cases, their genocide. That history of racial dispossession and the imprint of Lockeain thought has led many Black people to believe that if we embrace ownership we can become like Walker's "white possessor": possessing and therefore self-possessed, we move from object to subject, vis-à-vis a capitalist personhood. It's the magic transformation from enslavement and colonization into another, freer state. We see this in the desire, say, to not be a sharecropper after the Civil War and instead the self-sufficient farmer; to not be the renter, forever at the mercy of a landlord, but the owner of the land, the lord himself.

Frederick Douglass's 1873 Address Delivered to the Third Annual Fair of the Tennessee Colored Agricultural and Mechanical Association gives us another example of this belief. He commands Black people to "accumulate property . . . property, money if you please, will purchase for us the only condition upon which any people can rise to the dignity of genuine manhood." 3 In her 1977 migration novel Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison has the Black and proudly propertied Macon Dead offer this bit of advice to his son Milkman: "Let me tell you right now the one important thing you'll ever need to know: Own things. And let the things you own own other things. Then you'll own yourself. and other people too."4 She sees where Dead's thinking leads: backward into a black re-enactment of white mastery.

I am trying to unstick Black historical thinking about land ownership — mainly the fetishizing of land as property — to further unstick the residual belief that Black capitalist personhood itself is desirable, can ever be a vehicle for liberation, can ever be compatible with the preservation of life and living things in the long view, beyond the present, toward the future, such as it is. As Morrison instructs us, that Black future can not be Dead.

Thinking affectively rather than practically, I am wondering what the historical experience of enclosing land, owning it, and making that land a site of exclusion engenders relationally even when that goal is to stabilize and sustain lives carrying histories of forced displacements, migrations, and plunder. It is an inescapable fact that we must make life somewhere. But to introduce a question fundamental to ecological thought: is nature something that should ever be owned? If we accept that the earth is something that can be possessed and mortgaged and sold to the highest bidder, why not the air or the sea?

Indeed, in his 1884 invective against capitalism, Black and White: Land, Labor and Politics in the South, the Black newspaperman T. Thomas Fortune, during a period of radicalism, writes that just as air and water belong to a human commons, so does the land:

While this might seem like "common" sense, it is difficult to think in terms outside of the proprietary when it comes to land. We might point to alternatives to private land ownership, forms of the commons, as Fortune suggests in his work, or for my interests, forms of the Black commons specifically. With its promise of building Black community beyond the reach of the white possessor and its potential for mutual financial benefit, the Black Commons is an understandably alluring concept and practice. Environmental sociologist Monica White shows how that allure animates the question W.E. B. Du Bois asks in his 1907 address to the Negro Cooperative League: "[S]hould we go the way of capitalism and try to be as individually rich as capitalists, or should we go the way of cooperatives and economic cooperation where we and our whole community could be rich together?"6

My great, great, great grandfather was one of those who briefly sought a life as part of a Black commons, perhaps seeking that togetherness. I learned from his Civil War pension file that he had worked on a Black farming collective in the 1870s located on a former plantation in Mississippi. The plantation had once belonged to Jefferson Davis's older brother Joseph who had initiated an unfree antebellum Black labor experiment based loosely on the principles of the utopian Scottish reformer Robert Owens. The Union Army seized Davis's farm during the war and General Grant ordered that a variation of a labor experiment continue under the guidance of the Freedman's Bureau. Davis later retrieved the land and eventually sold it to one of his formerly enslaved laborers: Benjamin Montgomery, who had served as Davis's business manager before the war emancipated him. Montgomery's goal was to create an entirely Black "community of cooperation," and a profitable one engaged in the cotton trade.7

That vision of Black community was unusual but not historically unique. Before the war, there was the white abolitionist Gerrit Smith's experiment in New York State, Timbuctoo, designed not only to allow Black people to be self-sustaining but to vote as landowners. During the Civil Rights Era, there was Fannie Lou Hamer's magnificent effort, the Freedom Farm Cooperative, founded in 1967, lasting slightly less than a decade. There are too many examples to list. Many of them followed a familiar pattern, first struggling, then thriving for a short period before disbanding or collapsing. In the case of the collective where my ancestor labored, the collapse following years of prosperity was financial— a consequence of bad loans, a tricky cotton market, unwise investments, and racial backlash from the white surrounding community. In this historical context, Montgomery's "failure" speaks to the difficulty of re-envisioning what land can do for Black people within the enclosures of racial capitalism. In his case, the plantation returns as an economic palimpsest in a space possessed by the histories of possession it attempts to escape.

Lauren Berlant offers a provocative and useful conceptualization of the commons in "The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times *." They view the commons as "an orientation toward life and value unbound by concepts and divisions of property, and points to the world both as a finite resource that is running out and an inexhaustible fund of human consciousness or creativity . . . with performative aspirations to decolonize an actual and social space that has been inhabited by empire, capitalism, and land-right power."8 They go on: "Although the commons claim sounds like an uncontestably positive aim, the concept . . . threatens to cover over the very complexity of social jockeying and interdependence it responds to." Instead, "The better power of the commons is to point to a way to view what's broken in sociality, the difficulty of convening a world conjointly, although it is inconvenient and hard, and to offer incitements to imagining a livable provisional life."9

I am intrigued by Berlant's refusal to celebrate the commons as something "uncontestably positive." Going in a slightly different direction here to return to a subject I have been pondering for years, I wonder what kind of imaginings and world-buildings a rejection of the ownership of land — including a rejection of the collective ownership practiced in the commons — enable? What if the natural world could never be mine, theirs, yours or even "ours"? Is there a form of belonging, sustainability, mutuality, and ecological sensibility that does not begin or end at securing and controlling a parcel of land that will likely never be fully wrested from the capitalist structures surrounding it?

This brings me to the ecopolitical concept I call "dyspossession." The prefix "dys" in "dyspossession" denotes wrongness and failure, but being wrong and failing with intention and purpose: the failure to own in the ways that capitalism asks us to, and the rightness we can find in doing capitalism wrong. This idea of dyspossession is not the same as "nonpossession" — having nothing at all — and certainly does not denote the violent deprivation that "dispossessed" connotes.

Following Berlant, I view dyspossession as a term of transition10 that could possibly name a new affective relationship to Black land ownership that marks the Black commons as a necessary but impermanent stop on the way to enacting a more radical structural transformation. As she argues, we might consider the commons project "an imaginary for managing the meanwhile within damaged life's perdurance, a meanwhile that is less an end."11 The "meanwhile" of Black dyspossession is the antithesis of Douglass's idea that Black people reach our full humanity through purchasing a piece of land to call our property: an ends that has its beginnings in an economic system of ownership, domination, and destruction like enslavement itself. Rather, the "meanwhile" of black dyspossession represents a spatial, temporal, and psychological pause that allows us to imagine a place, time, and capacity to unlearn capitalist personhood and to undo the harmful relations that capitalist personhood engenders to all things. It should lead us to an abolitionist elsewhere, calling us back from the Dead, asking us to live and dream differently.

This piece represents an attempt to unstick my thinking for a chapter of my book in-progress, Captive Ecologies: The Environmental Afterlives of Slavery. The chapter, "Dyspossession: Abolitionist Ecology and The Black Commons," turns to Black ideas of the commons in the post-war 19^th century to consider the possibility of an abolitionist land praxis ecological in its orientation. The idea of dyspossession draws energy from a strand of Black radical nineteenth century thought that calls for the end of private property.

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Jennifer James (@femmenoire4) is Associate Professor at the George Washington University and author of A Freedom Bought with Blood: African American War Literature, the Civil War-World War II . She is currently at work on two books, Captive Ecologies: The Environmental Afterlives of Slavery, and Black Jack: Andrew Jackson and Black Cultural Memory. Her previous work has appeared in a range of journals including Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, American Literature, American Literary History, The African American Review, Feminist Studies and MELUS.

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