Wild Infrastructure: Movements Beyond Apocalypse - Deb Cowen Keynote at Peterborough Public Library

Writing in 1846, Kierkegaard contrasted the polite complacency of his present with the untamed motions of transformative times when he observed, “If one may say of the revolutionary period that it runs wild, one would have to say of the present that it runs badly.” Our times are neither polite nor complacent, and those who move against the tides of dispossession, fascism and border imperialism are not only criminalized but dehumanized as vermin, swarms, insects, and animals. This talk learns from the movements of those cast outside the normal, civilized, or human – those who cross, trespass, reassemble, or refuse the forms of circulation that sustain what Gerald Horne calls ‘the apocalypse of settler colonialism’. This is not a call for ‘wilding’ initiatives that too often resuscitate colonial conceptions of civilization with a call for more ‘inclusion’. Looking instead to India’s Cockroach Janta Party, Minnesota’s L/ICE OUT movement, and following Indigenous, Black, queer and crip ecologies and infrastructuralisms, this talk learns from those who refuse not just their own dehumanization, but de/humanization itself by assembling infrastructures that ‘run wild’.