Abolition's Ecologies: Political Theology Beyond Property, Territory, and Sovereignty

Abolition’s Ecologies considers how the concepts of property, territory, and sovereignty shape political, theological, and ecological life in the context of North America. Rather than seeking to offer a politico-theological critique of these concepts, this dissertation places politics, theology, and ecology in a position to learn from communities who have enacted forms of life that resist and move beyond hegemonic frameworks. Chapter one considers the intertwined legacies of property and racial slavery before turning to maroons—those enslaved peoples who escaped from enslavement and formed alternative communities in inaccessible landscapes—to trace the contours of a freedom that is not bound to either possession or dispossession. Chapter two considers territory through an examination of the weaponized landscape of the U.S.-Mexico border that protects a future for citizens while excluding alien others; the chapter then considers the practices of care of border crossers, showing how they respatialize the borderlands and resist the annihilation of space by time. Chapter three contrasts Indigenous conceptions of sovereignty with the political theology of Carl Schmitt grounded on the decision for the exception; through considering Indigenous political and cultural scholars and Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1977 novel Ceremony, this chapter argues that Indigenous claims to sovereign power do not simply rival those made by modern nation-states but insist upon a different form of political life that includes both human and other-than-human relations. Chapter four draws the practices and ideas of maroons, border crossers, and Indigenous peoples into an abolitionist politics that seeks to replace a political economy grounded on policing, prisons, and the national security state. Not only do these institutions and systems produce and reproduce property, territory, and sovereignty but they also foreclose the possibility of other forms of politics. Chapter four closes with a consideration of abolition’s challenge to political theology, especially those that either seek to justify the status quo or enact a new world through an apocalyptic break. Rather than trying to imagine an abolition theology, the chapter argues for a new disposition that decenters Christian theologizing and calls for practices of attention and learning from radical struggles for liberation.