April 5, 2016 - 10:25
In their piece “A Glossary of Haunting”, which is written as an alphabetized series of glossary entries in the first-person, Eve Tuck and C. Ree problematize the connection between peace and justice. Under the entry titled “Decolonization”, they write, “justice and peace don’t exactly cohabitate. The promise of social justice sometimes rings false, smells consumptive, like another manifest destiny” (647). Comparing justice to manifest destiny is a powerful move. Manifest destiny, the assumption that the expansion of the colonization of America was inevitable, further fueled that unapologizing expansion. By placing this alongside “the promise of social justice”, Tuck and Ree draw out the idea that the spread of what we think of as social justice, when it does not and cannot set past wrongs right, is itself a sort of subjugation and erasure. Then, again, under “Revenge [recapitulation]” they say, “revenge and justice overlap, feed and deplete the other... Revenge goes drag as justice, or justice reveals its heat from revenge” (652). After calling out the hypocrisy inherent in our conception of justice, they raise the connection and interplay between justice and revenge, presenting revenge as a more attractive and fair goal than justice, although not one that gets rid of the injustice in the first place. Or maybe they also are suggesting that if we were to fully commit to justice, justice would be revenge.
It seems as though they are making the point that sometimes justice is impossible and thinking that it is possible does nothing but more harm, and the only way to move forward in a way that is at all productive is through revenge, as they put it, “wronging the wrong”. This makes me think of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ article “The Case for Reparations”, which I have not read but have heard summarized, and now definitely will read.