#tidalectics

[fatehbaz]

was thinking about this

To be in "public", you must be a consumer or a laborer.

About control of peoples' movement in space/place. Since the beginning.

"Vagrancy" of 1830s-onward Britain, people criminalized for being outside without being a laborer.

Breaking laws resulted in being sentenced to coerced debtor/convict labor. Coinciding with the 1830-ish climax of the Industrial Revolution and the land enclosure acts (factory labor, poverty, etc., increase), the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 establishes full-time police institution(s) in London. The "Workhouse Act" aka "Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834" forced poor people to work for a minimum number of hours every day. The Irish Constabulary of 1837 sets up a national policing force and the County Police Act of 1839 allows justices of the peace across England to establish policing institutions in their counties (New York City gets a police department in 1844). The major expansion of the "Vagrancy Act" of 1838 made "joblessness" a crime and enhanced its punishment. (Coincidentally, the law's date of royal assent was 27 July 1838, just 5 days before the British government was scheduled to allow fuller emancipation of its technical legal abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean on 1 August 1838.)

---

"Vagrancy" of 1860s-onward United States, people criminalized for being outside while Black.

Widespread emancipation after slavery abolition in 1865 rapidly followed by the outlawing of loitering which de facto outlawed existing as Black in public. Inability to afford fines results in being sentenced to forced labor by working on chain gangs or prisons farms, some built atop plantations.

---

"Vagrancy" of 1870s-onward across empires, people criminalized for being outside while being "foreign" and also being poor generally.

Especially from 1880-ish to 1918-ish, this was an age of widespread mass movement of peoples due to the land dispossession, poverty, and famine induced by global colonial extraction and "market expansion" (Scramble for Africa, US "American West", nation-building, conquering "frontiers"), as agricultural "revolutions" of imperial monoculture cash crop extraction resulted in ecological degradation, and as major imperial infrastructure building projects required a lot of vulnerable "mobile" labor. This coincides with and is facilitated by new railroad networks and telegraphs, leading to imperial implementation or expansion of identity documents, strict work contracts, passports, immigration surveillance, and border checkpoints.

All of this in just a few short years: In 1877, British administrators in India develop what would become the Henry Classification System of taking and keeping fingerprints for use in binding colonial Indians to legal contracts. That same year during the 1877 Great Railroad Strike, and in response to white anxiety about Black residents coming to the city during Great Migration, Chicago's policing institutions exponentially expand surveillance and pioneer "intelligence card" registers for tracking labor union organizing and Black movement, as Chicago's experiments become adopted by US military and expanded nationwide, later used by US forces monitoring dissent in colonial Philippines and Cuba. Japan based its 1880 Penal Code anti-vagrancy statutes on French models, and introduced "koseki" register to track poor/vagrant domestic citizens as Tokyo's Governor Matsuda segregates classes, and the nation introduces "modern police forces". In 1882, the United States passes the Chinese Exclusion Act. In 1884, the Ottoman government enacts major "Passport Nizamnamesi" legislation requiring passports. In 1885, the racist expulsion of the "Tacoma riot".

Punished for being Algerian in France. Punished for being Chinese in San Francisco. Punished for being Korean in Japan. Punished for crossing Ottoman borders without correct paperwork. Arrested for whatever, then sent to do convict labor. A poor person in the Punjab, starving during a catastrophic famine, might be coerced into a work contract by British authorities. They will have to travel, shipped off to build a railroad. But now they have to work. Now they are bound. They will be punished for being Punjabi and trying to walk away from Britain's tea plantations in Assam or Britain's rubber plantations in Malaya.

Mobility and confinement, the empire manipulates each.

---

"Vagrancy" amidst all of this, people also criminalized for being outside while "unsightly" and merely even superficially appearing to be poor. San Francisco introduced the notorious "ugly law" in 1867, making it illegal for "any person, who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, to expose himself or herself to public view". Today, if you walk into a building looking a little "weird" (poor, Black, ill, disabled, etc.), you are given seething spiteful glares and asked to leave. De facto criminalized for simply going for a stroll without downloading the coffee shop's exclusive menu app.

Too ill, too poor, too exhausted, too indebted to move, you are trapped. Physical barriers (borders), legal barriers (identity documents), financial barriers (debt). "Vagrancy" everywhere in the United States, a combination of all of the above. "Vagrancy" since at least early nineteenth century Europe. About the control of movement through and access to space/place. Concretizing and weaponizing caste, corralling people, anchoring them in place, extracting their wealth and labor.

You are permitted to exist only as a paying customer or an employee.

[thetendertongue]

tidalectics — from Kamau Brathwaite: a way of thinking and moving like the tide; nonlinear, cyclical, back-and-forth; instead of binaries (land/sea, past/present), embraces the ebb and flow of ideas, memories, and identities; resists fixed histories, instead allowing for layered, washing-over truths

[boid0ll]

A key thinker of creolization, Brathwaite makes us aware that hybridization is not restricted to land, but begins in maritime spaces and at the coast. Just like navigators who land at a new shore, bringing with them their living and constantly shifting stories, myths, and beliefs, the concept of Tidalectics can migrate from its original context in Brathwaite’s writing to other geographies and realms. The exhibition carefully transfers the term, mindful not to obscure its specificity but considering the notion as starting point for an oceanic worldview. Tidalectics merges the anchored with the itinerant and moves back and forth between being waterborne and touching land. It allows us to think of hybridity, cross-cultural syncretism, incompleteness, and fragmentation. The influence of the ocean is not restricted to the waters and aquatic beings, it affects land and terrestrial life just as much—as a source of food and as a threat when sea levels rise. The exhibition seeks to comprehend our histories as trajectories tossed by waves, from ocean crossings to systems of exchange, myths, and microbial origins. It highlights processes of cultural adaptation and material change, presenting a rich framework for understanding the coalescing polarities of contemporaneity and history, science and poetics, the global and the local, routes and roots, and ourselves with the oceans and their many and diverse inhabitants.

Vía

[loneberry]

Like the movement of the ocean she’s walking on, coming From continent/continuum, touching another, and Then receding (‘reading’) from from the island(s) into the perhaps Creative chaos of the(ir) future 

– Kamau Brathwaite, ConVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey

[pairedaeza]

Diasporic discourses often position masculine subjects as normative travelers who rely upon a feminized sea in order to imaginatively regenerate across time and space. This is why, in the language of diaspora and globalization, masculinized trajectories of nomadic subjects and capital attain their motility by invoking feminized flows, fluidity, and circulation, while the feminine (as an organizing concept) and women (as subjects) are profoundly localized.

Elizabeth DeLoughrey, from Routes and Roots

[fatehbaz]

last month, was reading: Maggie Dickinson and Simone Parker, "Policing the Grocery Store: Crime Panic Narratives and Enclosure in the Wake of Urban Uprisings," Antipode 57, no. 6 (2025): 2349-2368.

which came to mind when seeing this circulate:

beyond DHS power consolidation, gotta consider the utility of mythologies/narratives of "shoplifting epidemic".

which blossomed from police/state realization (and fear?) of the scale of popular resistance during 2014 demonstrations and, especially, the 2020 George Floyd rebellions during which "retail theft" (prob entangled with millions losing income/jobs during quarantine) became pretext for increased overt policing and expansion of other "soft" policing already employed in gentrified districts (you nearly-universally now need a "code to the bathroom" to wash your fucking hands or take a piss, to say nothing about if you have disabilities, conditions, illnesses, etc. so the surveillance/intimidation of Black people, suppression of popular disobedience, and criminalization of homelessness/poverty are all entangled.)

the outlets/commentators describing the law (May 2026) seem to couch it mostly in criticism of DHS.

while kind of shying away from criticizing the concepts of "organized retail theft" or "shoplifting epidemic". which, really, ought to be confronted and not conceded.

lot of the coverage of this type (not just of CORCA but of policing shit generally) seems to implicitly suggest "retail theft is bad of course and we should hunt down shoplifters, but this law isn't actually about stopping retail theft!!!" which like ... when did you concede that "breaking the rules is wrong and it's naturally good to stop 'crime'"?

for example:

[Excerpt] Despite its title, CORCA [Combating Organized Retail Crime Act] isn’t about combating “organized retail theft.” Its sweepingly broad language actually grants the Department of Homeland Security far-reaching new authority to collect sensitive personal information [...] about Americans who are merely accused of engaging in retail theft. Worse still, citizens caught in the new dragnet don’t even need to be charged with a crime—retail outlets can now work directly with ICE to provide citizens’ personal data to the federal government. [...]. [End]

Pretty bad: [Excerpt] CORCA achieves that goal by creating a new “national intelligence hub” that reports directly to the Department of Homeland Security. The center’s director will be named by acting ICE Director [...] and will be empowered to work “directly with retailers” to collect data on any person a retailer accuses of engaging in “organized retail theft.” [End]

Something also interesting to me: [Excerpt] But retailers can always refuse to cooperate, right? [...] While the language in CORCA may suggest retailers and local law enforcement are voluntarily collaborating [...], the reality is far different. [...] DHS can “prioritize” directing federal grants to communities that cooperate [...] That leaves cash-strapped local governments facing a brutal choice: violate the civil liberties of their residents or face crushing budget shortfalls [...]. [End]

sad lovely friendly innocent so-cutes "local municipalities" might not perceive it as such a "brutal choice."

thinking of Phil Neel writing on Ferguson circa 2014 [from Neel's Hinterland: America's New Landscapes of Class and Conflict, 2018]:

[Excerpt] [T]he dwindling population, fleeing industry, and plummeting property values had created [in Ferguson and the St. Louis region] a budgetary crisis, forcing many of the area’s small municipalities to rely less on their shrinking tax base and more on extra-tax fees and fines [...]. In 2013 fines, court fees, and other such extortions accounted for some 20 percent of the city’s budget. These fines were disproportionately applied to the city’s black residents [...]. These funding systems are not unique to St Louis, but instead became a national trend [...]. [G]rowth in these massive, extra-tax extortions applied to the poor [...] who are more likely to live in small, cash-strapped municipalities (or counties) with a dwindling tax base and less access to federal aid. In most places, this takes the form of an expanding net of legal search, supervision, and harassment [...]. But rather than an unfortunate exception, Ferguson is a window into the future. [...] [End]

---

anyway.

in eyeing DHS, can't let narrative of "shoplifting epidemic" off the hook.

returning to Dickinson's and Parker's 2025 article.

Abstract: US grocery retailers, drawing on faulty data and vague assertions, claim that shoplifting has become an epidemic since 2020 and have been organising to call for more policing. In retail trade publications, grocery industry representatives narrate shoplifting as a direct result of criminal justice reforms that threaten their businesses. In these moments, grocery retailer dependence on systems on policing come out into the open, troubling perceptions of grocery stores as benign or beneficial, as they are often represented in policy literature on food deserts. The history of grocery retailers’ broader entanglements with race, place, and policing helps us see grocery stores as contested spaces of enclosure that play a crucial role in maintaining a food system characterised by hunger amidst plenty. Seeing grocery stores as spaces of enclosure dependent on policing asks us to imagine something different [...].

They cite:

Gabbidon and Higgins, Shopping While Black: Consumer Racial Profiling in America (Routledge, 2020).

Reese and Sbicca, "Food and carcerality: From confinement to abolition," Food and Foodways 30, nos. 1/2 (2022): 1-15.

Reese, Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, DC (University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

Jones, "Dying to eat? Black food geographies of slow violence and resilience," ACME 18, no. 5 (2019): 1076-1099.

Wiggins, "'Order as well as decency': The development of order maintenance policing in Black Atlanta," Journal of Urban History 46, no. 4 (2020): 711-727.

Milkman, "Grocery unions under the gun in New York City and the nation," New Labor Forum 31, no. 2 (2022): 17-26.

---

stuff i'd previously checked out from Naya Jones:

Naya Jones, "Corner Stores, Surveillance, and All Black Afterlives," Antipode Online, 17 July 2020. URL: antipodeonline . org /2020/07/17/ corner-stores-and-racializing-surveillance/

Naya Jones, "(Re)visiting the corner store: Black youth, gentrification, and food sovereignty," in Race in the Marketplace: Crossing Critical Boundaries, edited by Johnson et al. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019): 55-72.

[fatehbaz]

As always, they wanted Cuba. [...] Even better, thought The New York Times, a [US] war with Spain over the island would distract from the crisis at home. “Why not,” the paper asked, referring to the possible acquisition of Cuba, “give the public something else to talk and think about” besides “the everlasting Slavery question?” [...]

In 1854, the USS Cyane burned Greytown, a dusty community on Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast, to the ground.

The pretext for the assault was to assist a white U.S. citizen threatened with arrest by local authorities for the murder of a Black man.

The backstory was that Cornelius Vanderbilt wanted to gain monopoly control for his steamboat and stagecoach business, which was conveying travelers rushing across Nicaragua for California gold. [...] President Franklin Pierce defended the ruin: Greytown was “a pretended community,” Pierce said, [...] comprised mostly of “blacks and persons of mixed blood.” Greytown, the president said, could expect nothing other than to be treated as a “piratical resort of outlaws or a camp of savages.” Washington was also competing with Great Britain for a [Central American] canal [...]

---

A year later, in 1855, William Walker sailed out of San Francisco with a detachment of fifty-five soldiers, whom he called La Falange Americana, toward Nicaragua. A Tennessee mercenary who earlier had tried and failed to seize territory from Mexico, Walker was backed by both Southern slavers and Northern investors, including Vanderbilt [...]. Spanish Americans across the hemisphere were horrified when Walker, after a five-month war, grabbed power and proclaimed himself Nicaragua’s president. Even more so when he reestablished slavery, in a country that had abolished the institution three decades earlier.

Walker was popular in all the United States [...]. Nicaragua, a play celebrating Walker's conquests, opened at Manhattan's Purdy's National Theatre [...]. Migrants from the United States flocked to Nicaragua to settle [...]. Walker offered them hundreds of acres of land and Vanderbilt sold them discount tickets [...]. President Franklin Pierce quickly recognized Walker’s government. [...]

---

United States gunboats were sailing further in Latin American waters than ever [...]. In February 1855, Paraguayan soldiers fired on the USS Water Witch, killing its helmsman.

The U.S. Senate was already annoyed with Paraguay for drawing up a commercial treaty that had contained the phrase the United States of North America. And so, in response to the attack and to satisfy congressional demands that Latin American nations refer to the U.S. by its proper name, President James Buchanan dispatched a fleet of nineteen ships carrying twenty-five hundred men and two hundred guns to deliver a revised treaty, with the word North struck out. Such a show of force left Paraguay little option but to sign the treaty, which opened the nation’s waters and markets to the United States. [...]

---

The idea [...] of convening an assembly of “all the American States of Spanish origins from Mexico to Chile,” wrote U.S. ambassador to Colombia James Bowlin, is a “ridiculous farce.” Bowlin dismissed the “mad pranks, and silly nonsense of pretended Statesmen.” [...]

[In Paris] on June 22, 1856, at a gathering of Spanish American exiles, [Chilean philosopher Francisco] Bilbao gave a speech proposing to hold a congress [...] to create a Latin American confederacy. [...] If not, no resistance to Washington would be effective. “Look,” he said, “you can see the smoke from the campfires getting closer. Listen, the soldiers’ footsteps are ever nearer.”

Panama, then a province of Colombia, was strategically important as the potential site of a interoceanic canal or railroad. Bilbao called it “the fulcrum that the Yankee Archimedes is using to lift South America and suspend it over the abyss,” so to “devour the continent in pieces.” [...] “Walker is the invasion. Walker is the Conquest. Walker is the United States,” he said. [...] Central Americans [from Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador] did finally unite to drive out Walker in 1860 [...].

---

All text above by: Greg Grandin, America, América: A New History of the New World (Penguin Books, 2025). Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism.

[fatehbaz]

When Ferguson was burning, the National Guard set up base camp in the parking lot of Target. Men armed with automatic weapons guarded the Ross Dress for Less. Beyond the border of the parking lot [...], [t]he soldiers looked out into that darkness as if expecting something. [...] In the American imaginary, [...] [these] spaces are [...] [an] the Eden of the white race [...] the centerpiece of [...] [a] nationalist mythology [...]. Some of these [...] are the type of exurb where people commute to the city to work as police, real-estate contractors, or managers [...]. [Some] are Surplus Cities [....] defined by segregation and racilalization [...] in the form of direct violence--by police, [...] Immigration and Customs Enforcement [...]--and onerous rents extracted by anyone with a modicum of power. [...] None of these suburbs exist in a vacuum, however [...]. The office of the financier is cleaned by the underpaid janitor […]. Local hierarchies are inset into worldwide supply chains defined by labor arbitrage [....] in places like Bangladesh.

Text by: Phil A. Neel. “The New Geography of Suburbia: An Anatomy of America’s Hinterland.” New Labor Forum. 14 May 2018.

---

They’ve built a “Great Wheel” on the Seattle waterfront […]. Silicon Valley myths of […] "immaterial" labor disguise a more gruesome dynamic [...]. Perched alongside a downtown business corridor […], Seattle's Great Wheel seems to peer out over […] [the] prophesied “cooperative commons,” an infotech metropolis abutting the beauty of an evergreen arcadia. But travel below Seattle’s cluster of infotech industries and the image appears much the same as that of a hundred years prior - a trade gateway, squeezing value from supply chains by selling transport and logistical support. [...] [L]ike UPS, founded in Seattle when the city was one link in a colonial supply chain [...]. In south Seattle, this logistics empire takes the form of faceless warehouses, food processing facilities, container trucks, rail yards, and industrial parks [...]. And, beyond them, the shadow stretches out to Washington’s rural hinterlands [...] and further still [...], where the Great Wheel meets its opposite: Memphis, the FedEx logistics city, watched over by a great black pyramid [the Bass Pro Shop pyramid]. […] Every Seattle is capable of creating a [...] “cooperative commonwealth” tended by apps and algorithms only insofar as there is a Memphis that can provide human workers to sort the packages, a Shanghai to build the containers that carry them, and a Shenzhen to solder together the circuits of the machines that govern it all.

Text by: Phil A. Neel. "The Great Wheel." Brooklyn Rail. April 2015.