INTRODUCTION

Abolishing Poverty

Speaking about the confluence of COVID-19-intensified ongoing inequality with antiracist massed protests, Cornel West lays out a core principle of our book: in the United States, a racial property regime protects white supremacy and is more important than some groups of people. We argue that this must be challenged with a revolutionary project for humanity. This viral moment, as disease, antiracist movements, and violent responses to both spread ever more rapidly, underscores the urgency of attending to the voices in this volume. This collection makes an urgent case for moving beyond “poverty thinking” (see Roy and Crane 2015; Lawson and Elwood 2018) to address the violences of the poverty relation under North American lethal liberalism and to learn from long-standing politics of racialized, dispossessed groups that catalyze profoundly different relationalities and practices that fundamentally challenge poverty knowledge and action.¹

These moves are utterly crucial in a moment in the United States that many are referring to as a “dual pandemic” of COVID-19 and enduring racism. The pandemic’s massive economic devastation, tremendous burdens of death and ill health, and the distinct concentration of these harms upon BIPOC communities make plain the stakes of inequality. This crisis is a powerful political opening: actions that policy makers have long dismissed as impossible suddenly seem to be minimally possible. In 2020, the Trump administration issued a moratorium on evictions, state prison systems released some incarcerated people, and cities across the country took action to house unsheltered people in hotels and public buildings. Yet these moves must not be seen as some sudden sea change in the white-supremacist regimes of life in the United States. These efforts should have happened long ago—as initial steps— in the name of racial justice, yet only when COVID-19 translated the structural racism manifested in eviction, incarceration, and homelessness into a public health threat against relatively privileged people did governments feel compelled to act. Only in the face of the failure of the liberal government repertoire have policy makers been willing to take some actions that prison abolition, land/housing occupation, and other BIPOC liberation movements have called for across generations—an unspoken admission that these justice movements have answers that the liberal state does not. In this book, we center theorizations, politics, and histories that offer a vital framework for understanding this moment and amplifying its disruptions to the racial-economic regimes of life in the United States.

Our book interrupts liberal framings and makings of poverty that transact and reproduce white supremacy. We explore this through a focus on North American institutionalizations of global lethal liberalisms (Baldwin and Crane 2020). Liberalisms have long been lethal for those who are constructed as “surplus” and marked for premature death (Gilmore 2002, 2007). The foundational premise of our collection is that poverty is a predatory relation that in the North American context has historically advanced white supremacy and the false promises of the liberal nation. Belying its supposed promise for all, the “self-actualized, property-holding” liberal subject in fact depends upon the production of subordinate Others through logics of racialized difference (Goldstein 2012; Alexander 2010; Wynter 2003). Further, we begin from the premise that poverty studies’ renditions of impoverishment rest on violent ontological and political claims of individualism, meritocracy, and white supremacy and on the techniques of categorization, measurement, and control at the heart of poverty research and poverty governance. Said another way, the ontological-ideological production of the liberal subject and the epistemologies and methodologies of knowing and acting upon “poverty” are intimately connected with one another, and with the material projects and institutional workings of liberal states. In contrast, this collection learns from political thought and action articulated by racialized dispossessed communities, joining a conversation with denied and disavowed knowledges that reject liberal violences. We argue for a reorientation away from diagnosing the violences of liberal poverty studies and instead offer a humble engagement with long-standing dialogues that are working for a relational politics of racial justice and equity. Specifically, our book is inspired by ongoing conversations between Indigenous cultural resurgence politics, abolitionist politics, and resistance and liberation movements within Black and Latinx communities.

The poverty relation resides in the entanglements of liberal and racial-capitalist ideologies and materialities of property and personhood. Within liberalism’s frame, poverty is rendered as a failure to self-actualize and to attain “propertied personhood.” Property within liberal governance can be understood as possessive individualism (Roy 2017, a3), wherein social life and material value are organized through ownership of the self—a logic of self-actualization—and through individual ownership of private property (Bhandar 2018). Prescient critiques of North American liberalism show how “the sovereign self is . . . a precondition for the claiming of rights . . . who is authorized to be this sovereign self? Who has the historical permission for such sovereignty? . . . [and] draw attention to the constitution of freedom through unfreedom” (Roy 2017, a9). These fundamental relations of property and personhood constitute the poverty relation within North American liberalism. That is, full personhood entails rights to hold and dispose property, to profit from property, and to be recognized by the state in the regulation of property (Byrd et al. 2018; Roy 2003, 2017; Blomley 2004; Bhandar 2018). The poverty relation sustains racial capitalism and reproduces its rights-bearing subjects. Racialized others are rendered ineligible for propertied personhood because both liberal governance and poverty studies ontology obscure the devaluation of much social life through ongoing forms of colonization arising from racialized histories of subjectification and dispossession (Roy 2003; Ranganathan 2016; Byrd et al. 2018; Bhandar 2018; Bledsoe and Wright 2019b). Racialized and impoverished subjects cannot be incorporated into liberal orders—precisely because those very orders depend on their difference and subordination (Cacho 2012; Espiritu 2003; McKittrick 2013; Bhandar 2018). Our book disorganizes this liberal framing of poverty, arguing instead that the poverty relation is produced and circulated through practices of racialized dispossession, the denial of personhood through differential social valuation, and the establishment of racial caste systems of social control, all of which rest on original and ongoing dispossessions of stolen lands and stolen labor in (settler) colonial and racial-capitalist sites.

North American liberalism is, of course, a multivalent and multiscalar project of enormous complexity. At its broadest, our book explores myriad ways in which liberal governance in North America is advanced through the lens of poverty studies / poverty knowledge to reinscribe racialized social control. Contributors reveal the ways in which white-supremacist capitalist power in North America depends on forms of actually existing liberalism that govern by simultaneously naturalizing and erasing racial difference, resulting in impoverishment and premature death (Gilmore 2007). Baldwin and Crane (2020, 369) term this “lethal liberalism,” a project of governance that understands “inclusion and opportunity . . . as finite commodities for a deserving majority [that] . . . extinguish certain modes of life.” We reveal the intersections between the discursive field of poverty thinking grounded in ideologies of individualism and deservingness that reinforce the legitimacy of North Atlantic academic poverty studies, and specific policies/practices this authorizes, to normalize violence against racialized communities. Contributors examine grounded expressions of liberal ontological power exercised through poverty governance, discourses representing “poor subjects,” and a constructed hierarchy of racialized social (de)valuation. For instance, Gutiérrez Garza and Lewis (chapter 1) trace how liberal poverty policies set up tensions between communities of Mexican migrants and African Americans in Tulsa, Oklahoma, highlighting their different investments in racialized identities of relative social value arising as they seek access to social services, overlayered with gendered ideologies of motherhood and family. Lawson and Elwood (chapter 2) unpack how liberal poverty studies reproduces racialized dispossession, setting conditions for whiteness as a system of property that confers material and political advantages. One striking example is the toxic trope of the “welfare queen” that constructs welfare recipients as Black, morally bankrupt, disgusting women.

Our goals in this collection are a recentering neither of North American liberalism writ large nor of poverty studies per se. Rather, our project disorganizes poverty studies, precisely because this body of knowledge reinscribes liberal violences. Our methodology for disorganizing poverty studies has three intertwined dimensions: epistemological-terminological tactics that avoid reinscribing the established terms of liberal social-scientific discourse, a focus upon forms and imaginations of politics that overspill the objects and terms of liberal (poverty) governance, and an insistence that liberal life depends on racial orders configured by white supremacy. Disorganizing liberal poverty studies at an epistemological-terminological level involves refusing forms of critique and argumentation that reiterate white-supremacist framings of knowledge, governance, and power (Lawson and Elwood, chapter 2). For instance, in all chapters we intentionally do not rehearse citational genealogies of academic writing on liberalism (even through critique) or trace permutations of liberalism across time and place. Authors’ analyses refuse the problem-solution and evaluation-judgment frameworks that script how liberal poverty studies is written and read. The chapters consider various diverse struggles toward survival, liberation, and thriving on terms that emphasize racialized and dispossessed communities as productive of alternative knowledges. We eschew arguments aimed at convincing readers that these politics are sufficiently radical, lasting, “effective,” appropriate, co-optation proof, and so on. These modes of writing and the many voices (not always in alignment) across chapters will unsettle some readers. Indeed, this is part of the point. Disruptions to the (impossible) neat conclusions, tools for action, and definitive outcomes that liberal poverty studies purports to offer are imperative, as is subverting the epistemological foreclosure move of constantly questioning whether these politics are “enough.” Instead, we invite readers into active reflection on what possibilities these chapters suggest for knowledge, imagination, action, and politics of accountable relationality within their own places, knowledge projects, and communities.

Our methodology for disorganizing poverty studies further involves centering our analysis on politics that elude and confound liberal governance and not calibrating this analysis back to liberalism. Authors do expose operations of actually existing liberalisms, yet their central focus is on articulating politics and actions that express and actualize resistance and survival that are not referential to liberalism. Rather than recounting yet again the politics of differential incorporation that characterize liberal poverty knowledge and practice, contributors instead disrupt liberalism’s politics (in the here and now) by amplifying politics beyond what liberalism allows. Herrera’s essay (chapter 5) uncovers a politics beyond the “suffering racialized body” to reveal how Chicano Movement activism in Fruitvale, Oakland, built solidarities around care provision for disenfranchised people. In so doing, Herrera explores antiracist mobilizations that transcend rigid identity boundaries, engaging in cooperative human efforts to care that forge what he terms nepantla identities of shared humanity. Ramírez and Daigle (chapter 7) envision a decolonial relational methodology for collective liberation. They argue for radical relationality among BIPOC people through storytelling and deep listening that embrace solidarities and also reckon with points of contention that can constrain the possibilities for fully engaging desires and movements for liberation. Our intention is precisely to disrupt lethal liberalism by engaging with political ideas and movements beyond liberal frames, ones that the academy too often ignores.

Further, our methodology for disorganizing poverty studies rests upon race as a foundational construct that prefigures some lives as “remainder” or “surplus” across extended geohistories and that shapes how social life becomes translated into liberal orders. Much of poverty studies situates race as one of multiple vectors of differentiation to be parsed and analyzed—an orientation that ultimately stabilizes the very abstractions through which liberal poverty governance operates. Our collection disorganizes these categorical modes of thought and action. As authors trace the multiplex formations of lethal liberalisms, they center racial orders of life. Importantly, they theorize racial formations as always already gendered, sexualized, and produced within larger geohistories of white supremacy and premature death. For instance, González Mendoza (chapter 3) illustrates how Mexico’s national ontologies “include” through racial formations like mestizaje that arise from disavowed histories of violent exclusion and are sustained by institutions of liberal governance such as schools. Further, she shows how transnational migration to the United States exposes these racialized subjects to another national project that relies on different categories of liberal governance (such as “illegal”) expressed in different registers (bordering, labor exploitation) but still operates in service of white-supremacist capitalism. Mallory (chapter 4) exposes the foundational anti-Blackness of the homonormative sexual citizenship through which many LGBTQIA+ movements seek inclusion into the benefits and protections of a white-supremacist liberal welfare state. Importantly, all these relational analyses think through geometries of complex social formations, rather than, for example, trying to tick through a series of coherent categories upon which liberal governance depends (race, class, gender, and so on). In so doing, these categories reproduce the naturalization of the nation-state as the basis of analysis and policy. For instance, national censuses organize populations into these categories as if they were inclusive, while simultaneously erasing the relations that create possibilities for politics beyond liberalism.

We join with scholars and activists who are working to abolish projects that expose racialized persons and Indigenous peoples to banishment, erasure, or premature death or that demand adverse incorporation into racial-capitalist extractivism and financialized capitalism (Gilmore 2002; Goldstein 2012; Byrd et al. 2018; Alexander 2010; Robinson 1983). In the United States and Canada, the production of discrete objects of social control, necessary to the poverty relation, arises from the devaluation of Indigenous life, lands, and livelihoods in a constant and restless effort to exclude racialized lives that hold memories of the original violence of this settler state. The poverty relation continues to be reproduced through discourses and practices of liberal governance, practices that conform social life to racial capitalism (Gilmore 2002), operate through heteropatriarchal norms (L. Simpson 2017), racialize processes of devaluation, dispossession, and social disappearance (Baldwin and Crane 2020; De Genova and Roy 2020; Cacho 2012), erase past and present takings of lands, natural resources, and labor, and disrespect Indigenous and postcolonial ontologies and sovereignty (Alexander 2010; L. Simpson 2017; Ybarra 2017). The poverty relation is constantly reinstantiated in subjects and places through bordering, norming, and property regimes that produce racial and heteropatriarchal categories to consolidate white capitalist power as it expresses in particular time and places (Goldstein 2012; Byrd et al. 2018; Alexander 2010; De Genova and Roy 2020).

In North America, the poverty relation has deep roots in dispossessive capitalist exploitation under settler colonialism, expressed through the taking of lands, stolen labor, and refusal of treaty obligations, all to secure white power (A. Simpson 2014; Moreton-Robinson 2015; L. Simpson 2017). The poverty relation upholds a racial caste system that secures white power through propertied personhood, through the financialization of homes and lands, and through myriad practices of settler-colonial governance, and its cultural productions, that normalize racial and gender hierarchies (Park 2021). For instance, the monetization of lands and homes defines propertied personhood and excludes people from shelter through urban redevelopment, eviction, and racial banishment (Baldwin and Crane 2020). As Roy (2017, a9) concludes in research on eviction on Chicago’s South Side, “Racialization . . . is much more than racial discrimination and racial exclusion. It is about foundational dispossession—the subject whose claims to personhood are tenuous and whose claims to property are thus always a lived experience of loss.” The monetization of lands, homes, and labor concentrates wealth through exclusionary banking and indebtedness that deepens differential devaluation of racialized people through mortgage foreclosure and other financialized practices (Byrd et al. 2018). Governance practices produce impoverishment through the denial of voting rights and access to food and housing, racial profiling in policing, and disproportionate sentencing and incarceration (Alexander 2010). Poverty governance and the social control of racialized subjects is also always exercised through the regulation of gender and sexuality enforced by, for example, limiting access to the U.S. social safety net to subjects who conform to heteropatriarchal gender identities and behaviors (Spade 2006). In North American states, borders further operate as a racial categorization scheme, deepening the poverty relation by designating some people as illegal and deportable or detainable (De Genova and Roy 2020). These political, material, and governmental tactics that reinstantiate the poverty relation are normalized and legitimated through academic and cultural productions and circulations of poverty knowledge (Lawson and Elwood 2018).

Our collection foregrounds disavowed knowledges and politics through forms of radical relationality, as an inquiry that challenges liberal concepts of individual personhood and private property that sustain the poverty relation. We bring together traditions of thought, politics, and worldings from Black, Latinx, queer, Indigenous, and diasporic subjects to disrupt the twinned logics of poverty studies and lethal liberalisms. Through our collective thinking, this book nourishes forms of relationality that provide openings for conversations about the potentials of reparative politics. Our volume explores the political possibilities that arise from reading against thinkable, that is, liberal poverty politics, to center and understand the workings of politics rendered unthinkable under settler-colonial and racial-capitalist liberalism in North America.

The contribution of this collection is more than only abolishing poverty studies’ role in validating the liberal state and its fictions of equal opportunity, universality, meritocracy, and so on. We illuminate how “poverty” is materially and institutionally embedded with U.S. liberalism and racial capitalism, ensuring the reproduction of white supremacy. But further, this collection opens up new politics and futures by learning from knowledge projects, politics, and worlds that abolish the poverty relation and by refusing to reproduce poverty studies and its ontological, epistemological, and governing techniques. This collection is a call for material projects aimed at shattering racial-capitalist and settler-colonial relations in specific places and times, with constant attention to the ways that racialized dispossessed groups are always already producing politics and possibilities for thriving beyond the poverty relation.

Learning from Political Traditions of Racialized Communities

Theorizing the poverty relation and the ways it reproduces white-supremacist logics of property and personhood lays plain the urgency of disorganizing liberal poverty knowledge and poverty governance. This collection opens paths for learning from and across political thought and action that seek “a present future beyond the imaginative and territorial bounds of colonialism” (Martineau and Ritskes 2014, 4). We start from the premise that long-standing politics of racialized, dispossessed groups catalyze profoundly different relationalities and practices that are crucial resources for this work (Daigle and Ramírez 2019; Valencia 2019; McCutcheon 2016; Herrera 2012; McCutcheon and Kohl 2019; Lewis 2018; Gutiérrez 2018, 2019). This collection examines ways of being, knowing, and doing from the Black Radical Tradition, Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and queer geographies, Indigenous resurgence politics, and decolonial geographies that refuse the ontologies and epistemologies of liberal poverty studies/governance and instead re-root from other relations and reroute toward other futures. Our book creates openings for learning from and across these politics, while also insisting on deep attention to both the possibilities and limits of doing so. Scholar-activists working in these traditions underscore pluralities within the politics forged by (differently) racialized dispossessed peoples as well as incommensurabilities within and between these movements and communities, while also charting possibilities for accountable relations and ethical engagements (Bledsoe and Wright 2019a; Byrd et al. 2018; Daigle and Ramírez 2019; Pulido and De Lara 2018; Pulido 2018; Ybarra 2017).

We argue that a politics of disorganizing liberal poverty studies starts from engagement with long-standing traditions of thought and action by racialized dispossessed peoples, precisely because these very politics have long critiqued the forms of racialized personhood and possession that sustain the poverty relation. Black Marxism and antecedent work by Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and others situate racialization as a fundamental precursor to capitalism (Robinson 1983; Johnson and Lubin 2017; Kelley 2002). Black, Chicanx, queer, and feminist thinkers make arguments about subordinate racialized, gendered heteropatriarchal personhoods as inherent to global capitalism (Combahee River Collective 1977; Moraga and Anzaldúa 1983; Lorde 2007). Dené thinker Glen Coulthard (2014) argues against a politics of recognition and accommodation with the settler-colonial state because this reproduces colonial power. Coulthard (2014), Corntassel (Tsalagi, Cherokee Nation) and Scow (Kwakwaka’wakw and Snuneymuxw) (2017), and Leanne Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg) (2017) argue for building a politics of individual and collective resurgence in loving relations with particular lands, rather than engaging with white, heteropatriarchal settler-colonial framings of property, personhood, and nation. Simpson argues for resurgence politics that are generative, arising from collective subjects engaging diverse ontologies and grounded normativities (A. Simpson 2014; Coulthard 2014; Daigle 2016). These critiques resonate across the challenges to racial-capitalist productions of space that Pulido and De Lara (2018) find within decolonial and queer epistemologies from Latinx geopolitics and abolition politics from the Black Radical Tradition and in Daigle (Mushkegowuk, Cree, Constance Lake First Nation) and Ramírez’s (2019) invitation to further explore the possibilities for co-resistance by abolition, decolonization, and anticapitalist movements.

Importantly, many of these politics diagnose racialized propertied personhood as the wellspring of “systemic inequality and endemic social suffering” (Million 2013, 6) yet do not explicitly name or examine “poverty.” They illuminate the poverty relation without reproducing the liberal violence of the category of “poverty.” Further, they foreground sites and forms of politics that reject racialized propertied personhood. Robinson (1983) points to refusal as a fundamental expression of Black radicalism, rooted in the act of running away, of removing one’s body from the system of chattel slavery. Gilroy (1993) argues that collective self-affirmation of Blackness refuses multisystemic violent erasures of Black being (also McKittrick and Woods 2007), while Kelley (2017, 262) frames Black radicalism as including everyday acts of “ontological affirmation of Blackness that consistently beat back the prevailing logic of Black inferiority.” Related to this, Corntassel and Scow (2017) argue that everyday acts of resurgence renew Indigenous peoplehood—articulating a collective subject in relation to land and life that at base rejects Western individualism, heteropatriarchy, and liberal assertions of propertied personhood (see also Herrera 2012 on Mexican American antipoverty politics oriented around collective subjects). Indigenous scholar-activists have drawn particular attention to forms of life and action that reject settler-colonial formulations of property/territory and their harnessing up to personhood. Audra Simpson (2014, 73) traces Mohawk membership rules, practices for crossing international borders, and land claims that reject the legitimacy of settler-colonial nation-states and territories, framing these as refusals that “enunciate repeatedly to ourselves and to outsiders that ‘this is who we are, this is who you are, these are my rights.’” Daigle and Ramírez (2019) trace Indigenous activism practices such as radical hospitality (Coulthard 2014) that welcome other dispossessed people (such as racialized immigrants) and in so doing call out the illegitimacy of settler-colonial states and territorial claims and instead reassert Indigenous peoples as those with legitimate position to welcome newcomers.

Across the complexity and pluralism of abolition politics, Indigenous resurgence politics, decolonization movements, Black and queer liberation struggles, and Latinx geographies, their forms of refusal lead to generative politics that are always already rooted in other relations and worlds across multiple realms of social and economic life. Cree artist-theorist Jarrett Martineau (2015) names this both “affirmative refusal” and “creative negation,” noting that Indigenous artists whose work refuses colonial logics are always also creating visual forms that give rise to other subjects and worlds (see also Barnd 2017). Daigle and Ramírez (2019) emphasize the world-making/transforming possibilities of refusal and reparative politics. Reading across Black and Indigenous thought, they find resistance politics that refuse settler-colonial, racial-capitalist systems of oppression and foster modes of life and action aimed at restoration, repair, and relations of accountability. For instance, prison abolition movements not only refuse the racial violence of carceral systems but also call for wholesale transformations in housing, education, employment, and care and health systems as well as in normative social imaginaries around “crime,” “justice,” and more (Gilmore 2007, 2017). Indigenous resurgence politics also seek wholesale remaking of worlds and relations, as in Leanne Simpson’s (2016, 22) framing: “Indigenous resurgence, in its most radical form, is nation building . . . by centring, amplifying, animating, and actualizing the processes of [Nishnaabeg] grounded normativity as flight paths or fugitive escapes from the violences of settler colonialism.” Coulthard (2014), Corntassel (2012), and Simpson (2017) conceive of resurgence as a profound reorientation around grounded practices of ethical relation to lands, waters, communities, and human and animal lives on Indigenous peoples’ own terms.

While these diverse politics are engaged in affirmative refusals of liberal ontologies, epistemologies, and social formations at the heart of the poverty relation, we argue for the crucial importance of also giving sustained attention to their incommensurabilities. For instance, abolition politics that envision civil rights conferred by nation-states and/or Black self-determination through land/property stand in tension with decolonial politics that reject the legitimacy of nation-states and seek repatriation of Indigenous lands (Tuck and Yang 2012; Pulido and De Lara 2018; Daigle and Ramírez 2019). Latinx politics grapple with the complexity of social and political subjecthoods that may involve being both settler and racialized other within and across places and times (Pulido 2018; Ybarra 2017). Learning across these and other political traditions requires ongoing questioning of “what is distinct, what . . . portions of these projects simply cannot speak to one another, cannot be aligned or allied” (Tuck and Yang 2012, 28). For instance Daigle and Ramírez’s chapter argues for constellations of radical relationality, produced through holding presence, care, and embodied and accountable connections to those we are in dialogue with. We join with others who insist that learning from and across movements of racialized dispossessed peoples must start from grounded accountable relations and reflexive questioning of when, where, and how diverse politics might be practiced in distinction from one another and whether they reproduce anti-Blackness, heteropatriarchy, Indigenous dispossession, and other forms of domination (Walia 2013; L. Simpson 2017; Byrd et al. 2018; Pulido 2018; Daigle and Ramírez 2019).

We employ relational analysis to explore refusals and flights to the future as vital ways of being and relating. Specifically, we articulate a relational politics that challenges “fatal couplings of power and difference” (Gilmore 2002, 15) that have rendered numerous racialized and Indigenous political imaginaries, and the subjects who make them, illegible to hegemonic forms of power. What is rendered unimaginable (or, in our framing, unthinkable) is based on “an ontology, an implicit organization of the world and its inhabitants” (Trouillot 1991, 37, quoted in Baldwin and Crane 2020, 373) that continually centers white supremacy and settler-colonial capitalist power. Unthinkable politics, in all their complexity, entail the “subjects, meanings, claims, relations and actions formed outside the terms of what can be under existing racial capitalist social orders” (Baldwin and Crane 2020, 373). Our collection centers the premise that unthinkable politics destabilize the poverty relation by rejecting its projects of erasure, otherness, dispossession, appropriation, incorporation, and banishment associated with predatory/extractive capitalism. At the same time, we argue that unthinkability also entails forms of relationality that open the possibility for pluriversal projects of world making and political futurities. Our collection explores creative reworkings of subjectivity, pluriverse futures, and politics, beyond propertied personhood, made by persons who have been erased or dispossessed within thinkable liberal racial capitalism and settler-colonial states.

Unthinkability and Relational Politics

Unthinkability in our book is not concerned with putting rebellious politics into an idiom that is legible to Western hegemonic orders. Rather, we raise vital questions about the conditions that produce forms of unthinkability and for whom. We use unthinkability as an analytic to open up questions about how it is possible that myriad forms of activism, communities of survival and persistence, fights for sovereignty, and much more are all vibrantly happening in our midst but remain unthinkable to so many people. We argue that the condition of possibility for unthinkability is a denial of relationality, which sustains racial-capitalist politics of division, difference, and impoverishment. By contrast, centering relational analyses of unthinkability turns our attention away from poverty as object and category and toward ways of being and knowing that destabilize the poverty relation and its lethal frames of personhood and property. That is, unthinkability focuses on the relational politics of imagination and liberation that are the heart of this collection. This book pushes beyond liberal projects of recognition, diversity, and inclusivity, calling for flights to the future not yet fully imagined (Coulthard 2014; L. Simpson 2017).

This collection enacts three registers of relational politics. First, we challenge the limits of hegemonic knowledge in poverty studies by foregrounding how Black, Brown, Indigenous, and queer communities continue to be in dialogue with one another across time and space, revealing the ruptures and incompleteness of white supremacy/liberalism. We trace how knowledges and politics that refuse liberal and racial-capitalist forms of discipline and dispossession counter “a collective inarticulation due to colonial histories of erasure” (Daigle and Ramírez 2019, 81) by bringing into view that which the poverty relation violently eliminates. A fundamental challenge in this work is to grapple with the ways in which unthinkable forms of knowledge production and political struggles are so dominated by liberal orders of thought that it is difficult to think and speak beyond such disciplining frames. That is, our collection contends with the ways in which radical relationalities exist and thrive yet often are rendered unthinkable and unspeakable by lethal liberalisms. Second, we organize our project through a collective writing subject, disrupting academic orders of merit and individualism, offering a model for rebuilding academic spaces/relations. Our collaborative writing subject unsettles the white, masculinist, middle-classed knowledge and authority that dominate liberal knowledge projects and help sustain the historical erasures of racial capitalism, land dispossession, and impoverishment. Inspired by feminist slow scholarship, we build deliberate practices of ethical collaboration that account for differences in power and identity and resist the speedup of the neoliberal university (Moraga and Anzaldúa 1983; Mahtani 2006; Hunt and Holmes 2015; Mountz et al. 2015). Third, beyond unthinkability as marking the limits of hegemonic knowledge, our collection explores complex iterations of unthinkability within pluriverse movements and politics themselves. For instance, some forms of politics are intentionally veiled, so that everyday, embodied practices of social survival and thriving can enable those targeted for premature death to build and sustain strong communities (McCutcheon 2016; L. Simpson 2017; see also Mallory’s chapter 4). At the same time unthinkable politics is a way to mark the challenges movements face within themselves, as with anti-Blackness or heteropatriarchal refusals of sexual agency that may arise within justice struggles. Being in relation entails working with the incommensurabilities within and between movements and communities as we/they articulate political identities and build politics.

A first strand of our relational politics begins from the ways in which poverty studies has reproduced racialized exclusions from personhood, foregrounded a settler-colonial property relation, and reinscribed social difference. Chapters by Gutiérrez Garza and Lewis and by Lawson and Elwood trace how poverty studies itself is an expression of the power effects of violent liberal erasures that assert individualism, categorization, and meritocracy through violent and ongoing dispossession of land and labor. Our collection challenges these limits through relational forms of knowing and being. Contributors articulate a plurality of political visions and practices that have been rendered unrecognizable under the ideological terms of liberalism and hegemonic thinkable poverty knowledge and practices. Our collection builds creative analyses of diverse political traditions to explore the relations between political futures/imaginations that have been violently separated from each other (Woods, Camp, and Pulido 2017; Byrd et al. 2018). The chapters engage with histories of collective activisms, grounded ontologies of place-based worlding, and imaginations of pluriverse futures that fight for self-determination, renewal, and reclaimings of land and liberation. Our aim is to mount a conversation and a learning from juxtaposing the grounded, lively brilliance of Indigenous, Black, queer of color, and Latinx political traditions, imaginings, and world makings and their creative politics of self-determination and reparations.

Second, we forge relational politics by working toward creating a collective writing subject. This form has largely been unthinkable in North Atlantic academic traditions that reward solo authorship, speedy production, and “disciplinary analysis” that denies relations to the lives, lands, communities, and politics from which the work arises. We are inspired by the Sangtin Writers and Nagar (2006), the Athena Co-Learning Collective (2018), and others who write in sustained relation, as collectives. Our collective writing subject coalesces around relations of coauthorship in many of the chapters, the long-standing relations of authors to the communities, social movements, lands, and lives centered in their chapters, as well as our efforts to imagine and articulate this project together. For years, as various of us have convened electronically and in person to imagine the project, discuss, and write and rewrite the chapters of our book, we have read and responded to one another’s work (the chapters presented here and also other work in progress). The relational politics of this project are enacted not just through long-standing relations of co-creating but also in the genre of its presentation. This collection is not a volume presented by coeditors. Rather, it is a coauthored collection, committed to cross-disciplinary (boundary-shattering) scholarship, with all contributors invited to be coauthors on the book—one way of signaling the relations of its making.

Yet it must be said up front that our effort to forge a collective writing subject remains incomplete, aspirational, and fraught. As Black-, Latinx-, Indigenous-, Asian-, white-, queer-, and straight-identified scholars whose lives are linked to many places, we have different relationships to the concept of poverty and the violences of impoverishment. Imagining this collection together has meant wrestling with our differences. Our collaboration carries, and struggles with, the material stakes and lived experiences of dispossession, banishment, and loss of lands and livelihoods and the inevitable tensions of working with white settler-colonial subjects. We have sought to make ideas together iteratively and intentionally, learning across our different research projects and lives, yet it is also true that this knowing across difference is also tentative, frustrating, and painful. This is especially so because we are differently situated within white supremacy and settler colonialism and are at different stages of unlearning the ways they inflect our research, epistemological reflexes, politics of citation, and more. Writing in this context involves the hard work of crafting constructive critique while feeling frustrated or hurt by what someone else wrote (or overlooked), hearing critiques of the limits to our analysis that are painful to recognize, and sustaining accountable relations to one another.

Our ambition for cowriting this project and refusing the demands and expectations of neoliberal academic productivity stands in tension to the reality that all authors are (differently) positioned within the academy. Only a few of us have career seniority and institutional security. Most of us are navigating the stark difficulties of surviving the early career years—living far from home communities, feeling isolated personally and politically, and writing under intense publish-or-perish imperatives—struggles now amplified by unequally distributed burdens of care, loss, and precarity that both the pandemic and the even deeper intensification of racial injustice are prompting in our own lives. In preparing this collection, we have sought to practice a grounded care ethics of welcoming differences in what and how much each of us could contribute to collective thinking and writing for the overall project. Some of us contributed more, others less; some were able to join our collective conversations often, others less often—and still the overall project reflects creative insights from all coauthors.

The genre of this collection, our writing practices, and our wrestling with these inherent tensions are informed by a commitment to remaining in accountable relation with one another and with the social movement groups whose politics are at the heart of our analysis. Many of us are deeply involved in social movements that refuse whitened ways of being and knowing together. We learn from these relationships that care is a condition of possibility for the kind of knowledge politics we seek to build. Our collective writing subject is assembled through ethics of care that involve trust and openness, to allow for expressions of pain and the difficult work of learning across differences. We have been building these relationships as advisers, students, peers, friends, allies, and colleagues. Indeed, this work is possible in this emotional and interpersonal register only because of our accountable (but still fraught) relationships to each other and to those whom we collaborate with in our work. We are attempting to practice the politics we explore in the volume: of working across differences to be in accountable relation with each other, and with our multiple communities, in order to build futures not yet realized.

Third, our volume reads for complex iterations of relational politics within and between movements forging political futures beyond lethal liberalisms, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism. These collective imaginations are urgent, and yet we also recognize they are not new nor uncomplicated. Scholar-activists have long traced the co-emerging critiques of colonialism and visions of liberation as well as articulations of Indigenous presence in Central and North Atlantic and in African spaces (Robinson 1983; McKittrick 2006; Woods 1998; Kelley 2002; Gilroy 1993; Coulthard 2014; L. Simpson 2017; Goeman 2013; Daigle and Ramírez 2019; Bonfil Batalla and Dennis 1996; Luna 2015; Dahl-Bredine and Hicken 2008). In the spirit of unsettling hegemonies, relational analysis entails thinking through incommensurabilities within and between the political imaginaries of racialized peoples. Here again, we employ unthinkability as an analytic, asking to whom unthinkable politics are legible. This question shifts from unthinkability as marking the limits of hegemonic knowledge to unthinkability as (il)legibilities produced through diverse politics themselves. For instance, in some chapters this relational analysis illuminates how anti-Blackness and homo/transphobia circulate within communities and their politics. Other chapters trace how settler colonialism and racial capitalism set up mutual misrecognitions between racialized groups struggling against dispossession, caging, and social and literal death. The political imaginations expressed by other authors open the conversation about the possibility that “The decolonial . . . [could be] an affirmative refusal of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, the settler colonial state and a racialized political economy of containment, displacement and violence” (Daigle and Ramírez 2019, 80). Our project also explores the tactics and reasons why some communities and their members may intentionally strive to veil their politics and/or cultivate positions of illegibility not just to hegemonic knowledge and politics but to other groups also calling for radical flights to the future.

These relational politics invite solidarities that begin from fighting against anti-Blackness in all communities. Related to this, they call white-identified people to take account of, and responsibility for, their role in benefiting from and bolstering a colonial state, a white-supremacist society, extractive, financialized capitalism, and forms of academic knowledge production that reproduce lethal liberalisms and normalize violence against racialized communities. One responsibility of white contributors and readers is not to appropriate the theory and politics imagined and fought for by racialized communities but rather to learn their own histories, to disrupt white supremacy through critiques of racial capitalism and settler colonialism and to build accountable relations to places and peoples with whom they work and live.

Abolishing Poverty: Engaging Pluriverse Politics and Futurities

The heart of this book explores the lessons arising from complex forms of resurgent/resistant politics to mount an argument for abolishing liberal poverty studies. Attempting to address pervasive inequality and endemic social suffering through liberal poverty studies is fundamentally flawed because poverty knowledge rests on logics of adverse incorporation and a racial ontology of difference that reproduces white supremacy in North America. Our book opens space for relational political thinking first by challenging the epistemological violence of liberal thought and action, specifically as expressed through poverty studies and white liberal mythologies of the American dream. In constructing discrete objects of social control, poverty studies sustain white supremacy by obscuring the poverty relation at the very heart of settler-colonial, racial capitalism. We argue that relational analysis is a condition of possibility both for uncovering the violences of the poverty relation and for knowing and being otherwise. Second, contributors disentangle the poverty relation itself in its material, political, and ontological dimensions, revealing the ways in which diverse social movements and communities struggle to construct dignified lives and forms of self-determination. Third, our chapters explore ongoing (or needed) conversations and practices of relational politics that can open space for building multiracial, intersectional, and intergenerational solidarities. As our book looks toward pluriverse politics beyond liberal poverty thought, contributors pose questions about how to respectfully and accountably participate in grounded relations of engagement that are simultaneously hopeful and fraught. They explore both possibilities and incommensurabilities arising from challenging anti-Blackness and Indigenous erasure in diverse communities, and they engage the persistent risk of white appropriation of radical thought and explore the very meanings of radicalism.

Challenging the epistemological violence of liberal thought and poverty studies, Ana Gutiérrez Garza and Jovan Scott Lewis trace how liberal poverty knowledge and action set up contradictions between communities of Mexican migrants and African Americans exposed to racialized impoverishment, even in social service provision by and for their communities. Through personal narratives and life stories gathered from within two communities in Tulsa, Oklahoma, they show how ideas of deservingness and merit produce ethics and imaginaries of personhood and community benchmarked to liberalism and state structures that ensure its reproduction. Their chapter demonstrates the difficulties and complexities of community formation as struggles to assert liberal personhood, demanded by liberal poverty governance, set racialized groups in opposition to each other as they struggle to assert social value and claim access to material assistance for their own communities.

In narratives of community uplift, the American dream, and poverty studies, whiteness is at once ontological and political, contributing in both registers to projects of lethal liberalisms. Victoria Lawson and Sarah Elwood’s chapter, inspired by antiracist scholarship, traces the whiteness of liberal poverty studies. They argue that the historical racialized foundations of poverty studies, the social categories it reifies, and its complicity in liberal governance of settler-colonial, racial capitalism must all be exposed and dismantled. Lawson and Elwood trace the violent categorizations that sustain the poverty object, liberal governance, and white supremacy in the United States, arguing that these divert analysis from understanding and dismantling the poverty relation. They illustrate these arguments through reflection on their own roles in reproducing the whiteness of poverty studies through a narrowly conceived “relational poverty” project that is now actively being remade through collaborative learning. Their essay invites scholars to take up collective responsibility for disrupting (and eventually abolishing) white privilege and institutional/structural racism in the academy, in poverty studies and far beyond.

Disorganizing poverty studies and its modes of thought and action lays bare the poverty relation as a site for political struggle. Foregrounding historical and ongoing material dispossession and racist projects of (de)legitimation, our collection interrupts and refuses the ontological object “poverty.” In place of this static concept, several chapters explore the ways in which the poverty relation leads to banishment, erasure, denial of vital resources, or premature death. They illuminate the ways in which the poverty relation, sustained through liberal categorical frames, positions communities of color in opposition to each other in their struggles for self-determination, land, and life. Relational politics undertaken by diverse communities expose these relations of discipline and oppression and instead imagine into being forms of politics that refuse these separations and dispossessions. Yolanda González Mendoza exposes the workings of the poverty relation through her autobiographical account of her journey from Mexico to Seattle as well as through lifelong ethnography in her community in Mexico and the United States. Inspired by Black geographies’ arguments that the oppressed, even as they are marginalized, produce space and live rich lives, her essay analyzes simultaneous geographies of oppression and un/thinkable resistance. She traces ways in which racial capitalism entrenches institutional racism to produce displacement, bordering, de-Indianization/mestizaje, and illegality. She shows how ideologies of modernity, racial capitalism, and bordering practices come together to produce the privileged individual, the “legal” liberal citizen, and its constituent Other, the “illegal.” Her analysis traces how this production of “illegal” nonpersonhood authorizes forced mobility, labor exploitation, and family separation while making these harms appear to be logical and necessary. Yet her essay ultimately reveals ongoing practices of relational resistance from communities that are thriving in spite of oppressive norms. For instance, González Mendoza demonstrates that collective citizenship-sharing practices enable a reterritorialization of U.S. citizenship and disrupt and challenge the propertied, privileged constructions of person and citizen that stabilize liberal citizenship. Instead, collective citizenship ensures that cross-border and cross-generational relations of solidarity will endure.

Our collection explores creative reworkings of subjectivity and pluriverse politics that abolish propertied personhood and lethal liberalisms. Our contributors trace complex struggles and negotiations of community politics, forged by persons who have been rendered illegible and/or dispossessed within liberal racial capitalism, striving for solidarity and racial justice. Aaron Mallory writes about the overrepresentation of Black people within the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic, exploring the ways in which anti-Black racism is articulated through gender and sexual domination. At the same time, Mallory traces the ways in which race, gender, and sexuality become a basis for Black queer spatial agency to build advocacy. Juan Herrera explores multiracial solidarities and intergenerational struggles in the sixties Bay Area where the Chicano Movement worked in relation to Black Panther struggles against lack of educational access and police brutality. The chapter explores forms of community organizing that centralize care for people and communities as vital to building a politics of solidarity and liberation. Black, Indigenous, and Chicano activists’ efforts to create health clinics, educational centers, arts organizations, and legal clinics and to fight police brutality all take aim at bodily harms of racial capitalism (hunger, ill health, injury, and death) and rest in large part on reclaiming (safe) spaces for a politics of care. Herrera argues that we need to reposition the care of people and impoverished communities as an important form of politics advanced by social movement activism. Herrera grounds this work in an ethics of collaborative research, partnering with activists to collectively frame research questions and guide the research project through long-term partnerships.

Reworkings of political subjectivity and the politics of social change take myriad forms. Priscilla McCutcheon and Ellen Kohl trace intersections of identity, spirituality, and social change among Black Christian men and women in the U.S. South. They show how a Black church’s emergency food program intervenes in bodily hunger, claims land for sustainable farming, and carries forward food and environmental justice politics that originate in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. They trace how a social club’s everyday rituals of care for grieving Black community members led them to connect the pollution of lands to premature death. McCutcheon and Kohl theorize these acts as politics of self-determination, resilience, and refusal that forge forms of humanity and personhood denied under white supremacy. They explore quotidian “quiet” politics that seek to create a “beloved community” through everyday resistance that reclaims notions of Black respectability that are not referential to white-supremacist liberal norms and that challenge institutionalized and intersectional oppressions of impoverishment, racism, and capitalism. Importantly, they also explore illegibilities within these relational politics. They trace how these quiet politics arising from Black religiosity are often overlooked as activism and the ambivalent relationship that politics of self-determination and uplift sometimes have to white-supremacist liberal frames. They explore tensions that arise when Christian ethics of direct intervention into material inequalities and recognition of the humanity of all people become enacted as “respectability politics” and blunt the call for other worlds that lies at the heart of their vision of beloved community.

Relational politics, by definition, can arise only from accountable relations to lands, histories, and present lives. Margaret Marietta Ramírez and Michelle Daigle theorize radical relationality as an orientation, a praxis of decolonial geographies. They explore traditions of resistance as a constellation of embodied understandings of liberation that are always grounded in, and fully accountable to, particular lands, places, and communities. Their essay explores the ways in which places are shaped by traditions of resistance and resurgence among Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities as they discuss the possibilities for solidarity politics of self-determination and liberation. Ramírez and Daigle explore how struggles for decolonial futures expose the interconnections of racial capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy from one place and community to the next, thus revealing commonalities in the parameters of struggle. At the same time, they consider illegibilities and incommensurabilities that arise from “differential decolonial desires layered in one place” and how these play out in Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples’ interconnected struggles for land, space, self-determination, and freedom.

In closing, Abolishing Poverty disorganizes poverty studies as we know it by revealing the complicity of poverty thinking with projects of racial liberal governance. As COVID-19 lays bare yet again, liberal governance and racist dispossession are ongoing projects of social differentiation and material inequality. As the economy dives, inequality soars. As people rise up in protest against the inability of liberal governance to deliver, the criminal justice system fails to protect communities of color. This is a moment that lays bare the myth of liberal universal rights and protections, even as poverty studies doubles down on these projects by devaluing and disciplining racialized communities. Our collaboration breaks these claims by engaging diverse knowledges and staging critical conversations between antipoverty politics and Indigenous, Black, and Brown scholarship and activism. Relationality is the way that theory travels from one encounter to another, inviting reflection on how knowledge moves, how its meaning shifts, and how it might be challenged in different times and places. Abolishing Poverty argues for this project of relationality that abolishes poverty studies, reveals the material inequalities endemic to the U.S. system, and foregrounds political futures disavowed under liberal governance. Our book argues that disorganizing poverty thinking is a condition of possibility for joining conversations rooted in diverse frameworks for understanding the materialist bases for impoverishment and for articulating antiracist knowledges and political visions. These antiracist politics liberate people from individualized propertied personhood and instead build relational solidarities that reject racism that is corrosive to all people. In short, our book explores new infrastructures of possibilities and politics rooted in accountable relations to each other and from flights to the future that animate diverse communities.

NOTE

1. Poverty thinking refers to liberal, social-scientific, categorical thinking that constructs poverty as a noun or a characteristic and the poor as an object of discipline and control.

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