Liberal Modernity and Its Fictions: Lisa Lowe's The Intimacies of Four Continents

Liberal Modernity and Its Fictions Lisa Lowe's The Intimacies of Four Continents A review of Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). Cited in the text as IFC.

Amid the Black Lives Matter movement and ongoing decolonial and settler decolonial struggles within the United States, Israel, and elsewhere-in the apparent likeness of Black and Palestinian life and death enunciated during the events of the summer of 2014-a June 2015 electronic roundtable on anti-Blackness and Black-Palestinian solidarity convened by the independent e-zine Jadaliyya brought together over a dozen public intellectuals to weigh in on their linked, yet at times fraught, struggles.1 Roundtable participants highlighted the challenges of solidarity between the two, critiquing anti-Black racism within Arab communities in the United States and the Arab world, and discussing how Zionism has been the default position among African American leadership, at least prior to 1967. While many scholars have addressed the historical logic to this apparent paradox, roundtable participant Robin D. G. Kelley argues, "we need to know more and engage these questions at a much deeper level ... [that] grasps how slavery, colonialism, dispossession, the war on terror, etc., are constitutive of the current racial regimes in all of its global dimensions" (r).

Lisa Lowe's ambitious The Intimacies of Four Continents emerges as a notable enactment of this call to historicize the colonial and capitalist present and the racial regimes that encode and reproduce such relations of power, and to remain attentive to their differently situated yet inextricably linked histories. Yet in developing a historically situated, anti-racist, decolonial, and settler decolonial politics, Lowe's work draws forth some of the intellectual and political tensions between Black studies (particularly the school of thought known as Afro-Pessimism) and Native American and Indigenous studies. Ultimately, however, Lowe fashions a shared space for both without foreclosing the incommensurabilities between them. In both content and methodology, The Intimacies of Four Continents therefore coheres the myriad modes of analysis prompted by past and present intimacies between seemingly disparate racialized and colonized peoples- such as the mutually intelligible forms of anti-Black and anti-Arab settler state violence and capitalist dispossession, and shared strategies for survival-while at the same time providing new points of departure for further dialogue and for imagining...