Anticolonial Georgetown Audio Tour

An audio detour through Georgetown, mapping out interconnection relationships in our field mouse constellation. For PHIL 418, by Maddie, Max and Michael.

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Final Project Overview

Hello, fellow decolonial comrades!

We’ve prepared an audio (de)tour of Georgetown for you all based on seven authors—Mbembe, Forbes, Cusicanqui, Dotson, Murdock, Liboiron, and Taíwo—for our final project for PHIL418. Mush forward to hear and read more!

NEXT: Constellation

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Anticolonial Constellation (Group 2) - Google My Maps

Anticolonial Constellation (Group 2)

Our text constellation follows the image of a running field mouse:

Not only is this an eerie resemblance, but it’s also got some decolonial weight to it. In colonial Rangoon (in modern day Myanmar), the Town Mouse, a gossip column, was a powerful anti-colonial tool to spread information. Moreover, rodents historically have been treated as disease vectors, vilified, exterminated, and eliminated—but have been resilient in spite of it all. Plus Georgetown is crawling with rats, so it makes sense that our Georgetown tour is correlated with this constellation.

NEXT: Tour Map

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Welcome to our campus audio tour. It visits six locations:

1. Arrupe

2. The Hospital

3. ICC

4. Leo’s

5. Lau

6. Observatory

You can navigate through the index, or by clicking the individual links associated with the text above.

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Welcome to our online tour of the illustrious and infamous Georgetown University, an esteemed educational institution with a harrowing legacy of racism, colonialism, and other forms of identity-based oppressions. Today we will be embarking on a journey across campus, highlighting various locations which exemplify Georgetown’s continuous colonial project. Together, we will analyze these spaces through the eyes of various anti-colonial philosophers and theorists, including Max Liboiron, Kristie Dotson, Esme Green Murdock, Jack Forbes, Achille Mbembe, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, and Olufemi O. Taíwo. Let’s begin!

We start our tour at a very important location on campus – one which many students didn’t know the significance of until 2016 when an article written by Rachel L Swarns titled “272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does it Owe to Their Descendants?” was published in the New York Times. The spot is not a building, but a walkway outside of Arrupe Hall, a dormitory that opened to residents in the fall semester of 2016 – just months before the release of the article. However it is not the walkway which we are here to discuss, but what lies beneath it. Under this path lie the bodies of hundreds of enslaved people who built and maintained the University during its founding years. Ever since the discovery of Georgetown’s malicious legacy regarding the treatment of their enslaved people, the Arrupe walkway has become a physical reminder of the violence upon which the university was constructed.

The explicit erasure of these enslaved bodies through the literal burial of their corpses and subsequent construction of a dormitory on top aligns with Esme Green Murdock’s notion of the “terrortory” as a “violent landscape and environment terraformed to suit settler presents and futurities fundamentally not of their making and devoid of their consent.” Georgetown itself has always endured as a terrortory – not only is the primary goal of the educational institution to instill settler colonial values in future generations, but the university itself would not exist in the capacity it does today had it not been for the labor and exploitation of enslaved people. The terrortory persists today, as terrortories are designed to do, through what Murdock notes is a “fundamental feature of settler colonialism, which is the erasure of the physical and environmental violence that forms the settler colony.” The silence on the part of the Jesuits of this complete disregard for human life on behalf of enslaved bodies perfectly exemplifies this erasure and the continuation of the colonial state as a part of Georgetown’s legacy.

Achille Mbembe’s theorizing in the book Necropolitics echoes this concept of the terrortory by highlighting how the colonial powers of the world erase the violence they enact by disguising themselves as the democratic powers of the world. He notes that governments control their citizens by exposing them to death and suffering. While the bodies buried under Arrupe found their eternal resting place in Georgetown, this space also serves as a physical symbol for the over 272 enslaved people that the university sold to Jesuits in Louisiana when they heard that freedom for the enslaved was on the horizon. While Georgetown could have allowed their enslaved people to live free lives following their emancipation, they opted instead to maintain possession of these human beings within the Catholic Church so as to continue their “religious” mission of indoctrination, as well as to receive monetary capital which served to help support a university that was facing bankruptcy. This continuation of suffering and death is a prime example of how Mbembe’s necropolitics functions to perpetuate settler colonialism.

While the prior two theorists have focused primarily on the historical contextualization of Georgetown’s legacy regarding slavery, Kristie Dotson provides a framework for understanding the project of slavery in relation to the erasure of Indigenous communities – both serving to support and continue settler colonialism. In her article, “On the Way to Decolonization in a Settler Colony: Re-introducing Black Feminist Identity Politics,” Dotson highlights the settler-native-slave triad. The concept of the settler-native-slave triad calls our attention even further into the history of Georgetown, examining the violence which pre-dated and allowed the arrival of enslaved people – that of the forced removal of Indigenous people from their land. Dotson points out what she refers to as “twilights,” the notion of “the labor that couldn’t be eliminated immediately, or Indigenous labor, and also the labor that needed to be permanently structured, or slave labor.” Dotson denotes how a logic of elimination serves to erase the violence enacted upon both of these groups in different ways in order to support the overall settler colonial project. For example, we can look at the university and student organizing efforts on behalf of the descendants of the GU272 as lacking in their fight for reparations on behalf of the Indigenous communities which were also exploited, relocated, and erased by Georgetown.

Finally, we turn to Olufemi O. Taíwo and his public lecture titled “Reconsidering Reparations” to take a look at the question many students and descendants of the GU272+ are asking: How can Georgetown atone for its violent legacy? Taiwo discusses reparations through three key tenets: (1) Reparations should make tangible differences in the material conditions of people’s lives, (2) Reparations should address the core moral wrongs of Trans-atlantic slavery and colonialism, and (3) Reparations should discriminate – how they distribute benefits and burdens should be based on the different relationships of persons and institutions to the core moral wrong. Taíwo also places an emphasis on world rebuilding as the necessary project of reparations, noting that reparations cannot exist within a global community that was constructed on a foundational basis of settler colonialism and imperialism. One important part of this rebuilding for Taíwo is climate justice. While Georgetown student organizers and the university system have made attempts at developing a plan for reparations specifically geared towards the descendants of those 272+ slaves, they have lacked in their connection to land and the environment. If Georgetown truly wants to create a lasting impact and transform into a university which is a part of the decolonial project, climate justice must be a part of the conversation, along with Georgetown’s many other colonial benefits.

NEXT: The Hospital

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Furthermore, Forbes and Liberiron would note that while the central mission reiterated at MedStar: cura personalis, or caring for the whole person, may ambitiously seek to fulfill physical and spiritual comfort, it is also narrowly anthropocentric, designating the human as distinctive and greater than the rest of nature. Where is the consideration of how the health of one’s broader environment is intimately tied with the health of human individuals and communities? You would be hard pressed to find MedStar Hospital sticking to a political line of environmental justice that would address and act upon the origin of so many human maladies under colonialism.

The second location on our tour is the MedStar Georgetown University Hospital. The Hospital itself was originally founded in 1898 and became a member of the MedStar Health organization in 2000. The hospital is currently undergoing an additional construction project of nearly half a million square feet of land, an ongoing reminder of how settler-colonialism is a continuous structure rather than an singular historical event. With each new building constructed on the campus, the removal of indigenous peoples on the land is further sanctioned and naturalized.

We first began with Arrupe to center land in our discussion and its relation to both indigenous struggle and slavery at Georgetown as well as the readings central for this tour. However, we now look at the MedStar Hospital due do its immediate relevancy for the core text in this project, ”Terrortories: Colonialism’s Built Environments as Structural Disablement” by Esme Greene Murdock. The “terrortories,” Murdock describes create a veritable apocalypse, one that not only destroys indigenous landscapes but builds a top of them using indigenous land and peoples to construct settler landscapes. As a broader colonial institution, the hospital has long stood as an example of this settler terrortory.

If you visit the website of the MedStar Hospital, you would notice a series of values such as service, patient first, integrity, and respect. Yet what an anti-colonial standpoint on the Western hospital reveals is how far these values have been from the realities of the colonized. Murdock, for example, focuses on the medical experiences and criticisms that Franz Fanon made of French hospitals during his service in French Algeria. One of the core aspects that Murdock stresses about Fanon’s work is how the mental fortitude of the colonized is judged by the colonizer as “insane” or “mentally ill.” This racist approach entirely disregards serious consideration that the colonized were estranged from the apocalyptic conditions of settler-colonialism. For example, Fanon found that the doctors in French Algeria used an experimentation called the Thematic Apperception Test, which examined patients’ “imaginative capabilities.” These tests were conducted using card visuals, but doctors pathologized Algerian patients as “imaginatively deficient” because they were far less likely to identify the images and contexts of the cards despite most images depicting European, not Algerian, scenery and objects. Colonial authorities than used these tests to frame Algerians’ medical disabilities as the result of inferior racial qualities rather than the traumatic aftereffects of French colonization. Thus, Fanon and Murdock expand beyond a purely material analysis of settler-colonial violence, such as land dispossession and economic hyperexploitation. There is also a deliberate process of psychological alienation among the colonized that is then retroactively used by the colonizer to justify the ongoing and unjust colonial hierarchy.

Jack Forbes in Columbus and Other Cannibals also discusses how colonization is a psychological process through its mass-distribution of ideologies of racial and cultural inferiority. Forbes, however, reverses this arbitrary colonial categorization through what he refers to as “wétikoism.” The wétiko, a Cree term, is an evil person or spirit who terrorizes others with horrible acts. To Forbes then, wétikoism is the core psychological trait of colonialism, the “greatest epidemic sickness known to man.” It is the colonizer, not the colonized, who is ridden with an illness; an illness so dreadful that it leads to the destruction and eradication of life. In this sense, Murdock and Forbes can be constellated together into an identification of 1.) how Western medical institutions inflict harm onto indigenous worlds and people and 2.) that this medicalized and psychological pathologization can be reversed onto the aggression and control of the settler-colonial regime.

NEXT: ICC

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At our third stop, our focus is explicitly global in scope, stressing the worldwide implications and institutions of colonial violence. The Edward B. Bunn Intercultural Center, or the ICC for short, was constructed in 1982 and hosts various administrative and educational spaces across seven floors. The ICC also contains the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, a notoriously successful producer of Foreign Service officers, investment bankers, and other gears who help churn the motions of global empire and capitalism. With such prestigious alumni and faculty such as former Director of the CIA George Tenet, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and former U.S. President Bill Clinton, what else can we say but that we are currently standing in one of the pedagogical arteries of empire! The Dean of the SFS himself, Joel Hellman, was the chief institutional economist at the World Bank, an organization notoriously responsible for the construction of the neocolonial world order Kwame Nkrumah prophetically warned about in the 1960s. The former Vice-Dean, Daniel Byman, meanwhile served on the U.S. government “9/11 Commission” and the Joint 9/11 Inquiry Staff of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, taking up active particapation in and the construction of policies that have terrorized peoples in the Middle East and its surrounding regions for decades. 

At the ICC, we see the empire-building Murdock and Forbes warned about reaching its absurd, yet systematically logical, endpoint, threatening the fate of the entire world’s human population. You would be hard-pressed to find a more exemplary demonstration of wétikoism’s apocalyptic arrogance than Georgetown Professor Matthew Kroenig’s think piece “Washington Must Prepare for War With Both Russia and China,” published by Foreign Policy this February. Kroenig’s tenure shows that such irresponsible imperialist warmongering is sanctioned by the University. From the colonizer’s perspective, the possible preservation of settler futurity under the risk of nuclear hellfire is preferable to any fundamental undermining of U.S. neocolonial and geopolitical predominance. It is no coincidence that the namesake and founder of the SFS, Jesuit priest Edmund A. Walsh advocated for a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union in the 1950s, casting off the deaths of millions of Russian civilians as a “regrettable effect” worth preserving U.S. power. Ironically, the colonial terrortories at Georgetown not only destroyed indigenous landscapes through settler repression, but risks the utter annihilation of what settlers attempted to build on top of them.

This dynamic of apocalyptic destruction is perhaps the most extreme variant of Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics. In order for the colonial power to have any semeblance of security, it must feed its institutions and weaponry with the constrant paranoia of insecurity, whether from great power conflict to the racialized icon of the Islamic terrorist that justifies perpetual militarism. Here we see the arbitrary management of certain individuals and groups being subjugated between life and death, or who is categorized as disposable or who is not. Necropolitics is often dictated by the legacies and perpetuations of racist structures such as slavery and colonialism. When Georgetown remains silent over the Israeli troops and missile strikes that killed over 250 Palestianians last May and the ongoing violence since, but then immediately launches public announcements and event in solidarity with Ukraine the day of the Russian invasion, it becomes clear which lives the University relegates as worthy of value and which are expendable. 

The sheer scale and historically accumulative nature of this Global Racial Empire demands its complete overthrow and transformation into a new world order. Relevant to this point is Murdock’s argument that Fanon was more than an endorser of revolutionary violence counteractive to that of colonialism. Revolutionary action is also ontological and requires world-building within any affirmation of anticolonial resistance. Here, Olufemi Taíwo’s conceptualization of reparations, a constructive view that demands nothing less than complete global change, falls into play. The constructive view would grant self-determination over one’s own lives and communities to any of the afflicted groups from injustices imposed by Georgetown. And if any of those afflicted groups—whether the Piscataway, Anacostank, or Pamunkey indigenous peoples, the descendants of Georgetown-owned slaves, and others on the receiving end of colonial violence—decide that their own needs are incommensurable with the survival of Georgetown as an institution, so be it.

Now this task may appear insurmountable in the near future, yet that is no cause for nihilistic defeatism and retreat, for Taiwo also expresses the following: “We do not need to win every fight to win some worth winning. We do not need a complete system transformation in our lifetime to nevertheless have achieved something important and notable in the longer historical fight for justice.” Already we see this push for justice from those who actively resist Georgetown from within: in a one praiseworthy example, Georgetown students successfully pressured the University to cut institutional ties with a program earmarking a $30,000 trip for students to travel to Israel. Other groups, such as Hoyas Advocating for Slavery Accountability, or HASA, similarly aspire toward real material and transformative change from the University without losing motivation despite the vast tasks ahead of them.

NEXT: Leo’s

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We now find ourselves at Leo’s, Georgetown’s infamous dining hall. Built in 2003, the two-story brick building is the culinary heart of the university for on-campus students, especially as they are roped into aggressive mandatory meal plan schemes by the university. Intuitively, there’s no way we can talk about the dining hall without talking about food.

For Max Liboiron, food sovereignty is critical (and not just food security, which is more predicated on access to food, and not their relationships with food, and, by extension, Land. Writing from Newfoundland and Labrador where food insecurity is common, and maintaining relationships with fishing ecosystems is important despite plastic pollutants, Liboiron pushes the theoretical framework around food further to consider whether meaningful relationships with Land are embedded in the food we can (or cannot) obtain. And what Liboiron understands as “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems” is questionably protected at Leo’s, if at all.

“Culturally appropriate” food is often a stretch—denials of acceptable kosher and halal food are more common than the university likes to admit, and students of minoritized multicultural backgrounds often struggle to find culturally representative options in the Leo’s ecosystem. The ability for students to grow or cultivate any of their own food is a far-off future imaginary—it’s been discussed by the new EarthCommons institute as part of plans to develop a living lab, but it’s nowhere near a reality for students on-campus. There’s also little transparency about where the food provided at Leo’s is provided from. Does it grow soundly and sustainably? What percentage of it comes from local farmers? What percentage is rooted in industrial agriculture systems, where meaningful relationships with nature are often disrupted? Liboiron would likely see Leo’s as a disruptor of food sovereignty, warping and creating distance between us and capital-L Land.

Touring on, Kristie Dotson’s decolonial feminism would see the disruption to food sovereignty Liboiron sees as predicated on certain machinations of settler colonialism, namely a logic of elimination and the maintenance of the settler-native-slave triad. To be able to sever or limit food sovereignty, and therefore interfere with Indigenous philosophies of food undergirded by immovable relationships with Land, relies on the displacement and assumed elimination of Indigenous peoples. Leo’s, like Georgetown, and like all institutions of settler colonialism, participates in and depends on these same eliminative projects in order to operate in the status quo. Having had a great aunt enslaved at a plantation in Louisiana, Dotson is especially attuned to the labor dynamics that a logic of elimination works towards in conjunction with the settler-native-slave triad. Elimination is a structure coupled with the exploitation of cheap Black labor— a phenomenon that we see reproduced across food staff on campus. Black and Brown people overwhelmingly are at the helm of food service, and are routinely underpaid and undercompensated by the university. Think of the early-pandemic story of Stacy Walton, a beloved Leo’s food worker that had to depend on a student-run GoFundMe campaign to achieve some level of housing security.

We’ve also got to see Leo’s as a site poisoned by connections to the prison-industrial complex and complex histories of enslaved labor reproduced today in carceral systems. Georgetown contracts its food service from Aramark, a company with a well-documented history of engendering relationships with the American carceral system, a structure predicated on racial capitalism and predation enforced by the state against vulnerable Black men and women. In this sense, Leo’s represents Georgetown’s patronage of a supplier that continues to operate in prisons, benefiting from lucrative financial contracts attached—meaning the continuance of mass incarceration works in Aramark’s direct bottom line benefit.

Bringing Taíwo in now, Leo’s is just one site in a countless archive of others that must be a link in a future that requires rebuilding the world, a place where global reparations must materially change the condition of people’s lives, in ways that address the core moral wrongs of exploitative, racialized labor systems and is proportional to proximity to said core wrongs. When we look at Leo’s, we’ve got to see it as more than just a dining hall, but as an epitomizing facet of settler colonialism and racialized labor hierarchies, as well as just one more opportunity in remaking global structures

NEXT: Lau

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Thanks for making your way up the great big hill from Leo’s to Lauinger Library, a trip harrowing for many Georgetown students and a common example of Georgetown’s deeply inaccessible campus. You’re now at the Brutalist doorstep of arguably the physical pinnacle of Georgetown’s role as a knowledge producing and reproducing institution, with its 1.7 million tomes. It’s a good opportunity to interrogate Georgetown’s epistemological traditions and philosophies, and what the library itself represents in this order. 

For one, per Cusicanqui, Georgetown is often partaking in a type of academic ventriloquism—and a type of hierarchization that affords certain “academic heroes” a kind of epistemological ontology that lacks integrity, makes invisible Indigenous knowledge, and decontextualizes information. It’s hard to enter any classroom where critique is done where scholars like Foucault and Mignolo are not referenced, let alone not cited. Philosophy classrooms reproduce and venerate the logics of Kant and Locke and Rousseau. In fact, the library has whole shelves dedicated to each of these men and their theories, prizing them as epistemological grandfathers and unimpeachable field titans. Yet what gets lost is the roots of these work—many of these epistemological traditions are grounded in a deep sense of Eurocentrism, are undergirded by orientalism, and partake in the same eliminative logics that Dotson warns against. About Mignolo specifically, writing from an Aymara perspective, Cusicanqui problematizes the so-called “foundational” decolonialism theorist for creating an empire within an empire by adopting the language of postcolonial studies without shifting the power relations within universities.

From Bolivia, she has watched Mignolo and other postcolonial scholars turn the North American university into a practitioner of this sort of ventriloquism, repeating political theory without political urgency. To be more specific to Georgetown, it’s common for Georgetown administration and faculty to partake in discussions of radical theory without reflecting it in structural practice. It’s easy to speak about the settler colonial state and Eurocentric knowledge systems without interrogating faculty structures that reproduce said Eurocentrism, or challenging the day-to-day actors that perpetuate said systems. At the library, we see a lot of passive regurgitation of ideas without effectual implications on student or faculty behavior.

Forbes, writing from California in the 1970s after the AIM movement, notes how biased and/or racist scholarship is much more insidious than moral wrong: “such propaganda kills,” he says in Columbus and Other Cannibals. Some white authors—many of whom are sanctified as neutral objects in Lau—have, as he writes, been responsible for doing “irreparable damage” to Indigenous people, how they are perceived, and therefore how they are treated. He likens this sort of literature—fictional and nonfiction—to “ammunition” for racist teachers, missionaries, and other actors to justify elimination and indignification. 

Part of this is also reflected in terms of absence. There is a dearth of Indigenous literature in Lau, especially specific to discussion of the displacement of Piscataway and Nacotchtank peoples from the land Georgetown occupies. Though a number of Native American hymnbooks exist in the Shea Collection, Lau too easily erases Indigenous knowledge systems from the epistemological traditions of Georgetown. And in prizing archives, Lau frames epistemology as fixed rather than held in communities and peoples, which bucks against a number of Indigenous theories about knowledge and knowledge passage.

NEXT: Observatory

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We finish up our tour of Georgetown at the campus observatory – a spot which symbolizes looking beyond our current physical and temporal locations and using radical imaginatory pratices to construct our own visions of a decolonial future.

Dotson teaches us that before we can even begin to develop these intentions for a decolonial project, we must first contextualize our own specific geopolitical location within the history and continuation of settler colonialism. She notes that by practicing Black feminist identity politics and situating herself as a descendant of slaves she stops colonial powers from erasing the settler-native-slave triad, and is thus able to theorize from this position. This ongoing memory of how we relate to and are historically impacted by the project of colonization is a necessary groundwork for even the possibility of imagining a future outside of the settler colonial world in which we currently are living. 

Once we have grasped this sense of identity politics as it intersects with the history and present continuation of settler colonialism, we can move towards developing a project for constructing a decolonial future. Forbes’ idea for this decolonial future is rooted in maintaining Indigenous beliefs and practices, such as following the “good red road.” He specifically notes that adjustment in the context of a colonial system is not a decolonial project, stating “To adjust to a wétiko society is to become insane. To accept one’s self is bad if it means accepting personal behavior which is ugly, exploitative, or which represents a surrender of the need for freedom, change or growth.” Forbes makes the claim that we need a greater influence of “lifeism,” or “more respect for life, more respect for the living, more respect for all forms of life.” Generally, Forbes is asking us to live good lives, but not assume any essentialism to the spirituality of living a good life, for all forms of religion in their central, basic tenets are asking the same and point in the same direction: don’t seek power over others, just live according to one’s self.

Liboiron uses these principles and applies them to ecological issues and the problem of pollution. They continually acknowledge the work of the Indiengous communities that is central and foundational to the construction of their text, a practice which is evident in not only how but what they theorize. Liboiron shows us that a reevaluation of our current definitions of knowledge, activism, and environmentalism outside of the settler state is necessary for the development of truly revolutionary reconstruction of the world. There is no future for humankind if there is no Earth upon which humankind can live. The current colonial system governing much of the world has had catastrophic results on our environment. Capitalism is a system designed to exploit the land and natural elements which we need in order to survive. In order to address these concerns and create a future for humans and life itself, we must turn away from colonial means of defining behavior and beliefs and instead look towards those Indigenous communities who view land as something much greater than a resource to be exploited for personal gain.

Thank you for joining us on our tour today – as you stand here at this observatory and situate yourselves within our campus tour and global text constellations, we hope you go forth with this knowledge and move toward a revolutionary and decolonial future!