There could be no more important moment to talk about reparations than ours. The issue of making recompense to a people for violence committed against them in the past, of taking up the question of deracinations motivated by racism and disregard for those deemed Other, of compensating materially, rhetorically, for historical wrongs, and the continuing legacy of those injustices, of explaining present conditions in terms of chronologically removed but psychically resonant experiences, has assumed an unprecedented urgency over the past three weeks. Amidst the cynical discourse intended to provide spurious moral cover for the US-led attack in the Middle East, where terms such as “liberation” and “nation-building” abound, interrogated only in limited circles – the anti-war and divestment movements – the political gaze of what we understand reparations to be has been shifted by the forces of history: reparations is no longer a dialogue between the present and the past. It is now a conversation between the present and the immediate future: between war reports offered by embedded journalists today and the restoration of basic supplies – food, water, shelter, access to medical assistance – and fundamental rights tomorrow. Reparations, as a discourse of rights, as a project of restoring rights, of making things rights at any number of levels, is poised to become both the language of accountability – who is responsible for what is the question that has to be asked – and the articulation of dissent: reparations will have to function as the critique of Haliburton contracts and the right to Iraqi democracy and sovereignty: the right to claim a subjectivity that is not supra-nationalist in complexion, to repair a subjectivity that has historically been fraught with cleavages.

Within the context of our seminar, “Race, Justice, and the Politics of Memory,” fixing on the contemporaneity and futurity of reparation and not only its anteriority – its historicity, its long-ago-ness – has been central to our year-long engagement. Gesturing toward Iraq is, for this reason, doubly important for our project at Duke: firstly, because it enables us to open up the reparations debate conceptually: to locate violences, an their catastrophic consequences, in historic relation to each other; and, secondly, in this very vein, it compels us to internationalize the issue so that the African-American experience of the Middle Passage and enslavement in the New World, the genocide suffered by Native Americans and other First Nations peoples, and the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II is set in conversation for us with other geographical sites.

Our seminar traversed a vast territorial expanse, the from the ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, where Hutus and Tutsis, once indistinguishable fellow citizens, were involved in a bloody slaughter, to the horrors of Kosovo, where Muslims were butchered by Christians as an indifferent world stood pat. This was a trajectory that included detours through international law, South Africa, the condition of the disabled, with stops still planned for Latin America. Located in the New American South, we could not but frequently think our critiques from a place where the antebellum moment is only a gesture or a loose phrasing away. A necessarily ambivalent contextualization, if you will, aware of where we are speaking from but committed to refract our critical lens through Other places so that we might, for instance, ask how Africa figures in this debate or what the experience of the junta in Argentina or Peru – so valiantly opposed by the Mothers of the Disappeared – might offer us: what claims do those citizens make upon their state? What form, what retribution, might those reparations take? What role could human rights discourse, which some of us here fear could descend into and develop its own imperialist discourse and praxis, have in disentangling the knotted nexus that is ethnic violence and pos/colonialism, especially since human rights is so inveterately presumed to be the province of the metropolis, and therefore previously colonialist, center? Should the Belgians try the Rwandan leadership?

Our intention has not been to relegate reparations, narrowly understood, but to re-orient the debate by situating it within an international framework and to interrogate its efficacy through geographical expansion and conceptual difference. We have, as it were, not tried to de-center the American experience, but to implicitly challenge the terms of that discourse by reframing the issue – by asking the question from somewhere else, by keeping the here in mind as we turned our focus elsewhere.
It is in this way that the current state-orchestrated violence in the Middle East figures in our seminar: the experiences being suffered by brown, Muslim bodies, captured in real-time serves to animate and complicate those endured centuries ago and captured and imagined and kept alive in collective memory until the present moment compels a looking outward, situating not only the American military but those of its citizens who were routinely denigrated and exploited in relation to the world. Reparations in this form not only requires a re-orientation, but that concept most fundamental to the project: a reconstructed subjectivity: not simply the repairing of the old subjectivity, but its substantive remaking. Reparations is not about imposing sameness upon the violences suffered by different constituencies, but it is about making a claim for common epistemological ground. As much as reparations is implicitly a claim upon the nation-state, it is increasingly a claim that cannot, and should not, be contained by any one nation or any one people. The “world,” as the Romantic poet William Wordsworth says, “is too much with us.” And it is precisely because it is so much with us, that reparations should include in its project the “worlding” – not the easy equivalencing – of damaged, traumatized, and uprooted subjectivities. To speak, not in a common language, but an incorporative, disjunctive language. A discourse conscious of not only its own past, but the several other pasts and the all pressing demands of present conjuncture and the dilemmas it gestures toward.