Against Renewal

  • Christina Sharpe

1.  definitions. 

Renew: noun:   

a. The action of renewing or re-establishing something, or the state of being renewed, spec. the action of extending the period of validity of a lease, license, etc.;   

b. the action of resuming an activity after an interruption. 

The action of replacing, repairing, or improving the condition of something. See also urban renewal n. at urban adj. and n. Compounds. 

renew, v.1 

1.  a. transitive. To make (something) new, or like new, again; to restore to the same condition as when new, young, or fresh. 

 b. transitive. To cause to be spiritually reborn; to invest with a new and higher spiritual nature. 

 c. transitive (reflexive). To become new again; to take on fresh life or return to full strength or vigour; (in early use) spec. (of an animal) to restore itself in a healthy condition by replacing old body parts; (also) to reproduce.  

 

Renewal: noun: 

a. an instance of resuming an activity or state after an interruption. 

b. the replacing or repair of something that is worn out, run-down, or broken. 

c. the replacing or repair of something that is worn out, run-down, or broken, i.e.  

"the need for urban renewal." 

2. 

In the opening pages of The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom, Rinaldo Walcott writes, “The conditions of Black life, past and present, work against any notion that what we inhabit in the now is freedom. We remain in the time of emancipation.... Postslavery and postcolony, Black people, globally, have yet to experience freedom.”1 

That this is true should be clear to anyone paying even minimal attention to the cascading violences of the ill world. These are deeply dangerous times, urgent times. Times in which we are told and shown repeatedly that (many of our) lives don’t matter. 

A brief inventory:  

The conservative outlawing of critical discussions about race and racism, the banning of books in schools and libraries, the banning of Plan B, the overturning of Roe v Wade, the rush by many states in the US to make abortion illegal, the criminalization of miscarriages, the banning of conversations that make people (and we are meant to understand people here as white) uncomfortable. 

The rise, spread, and organizing of the far right. 

All money for war, not for education, not for housing, not for jobs and job training, not for universal income, health care, or moving away from the killing dependence on fossil fuel. Money for killing not for living.   

The tightening of borders (for some and not for others) as in Canada, the US, and Fortress Europe where whiteness and whiteness making in the interests of racial citizenship are on full and undeniable display—as we are seeing in relation to those Ukrainians constituted as white and cis fleeing Ukraine.  

Over one million deaths from COVID-19 in the United States and yet there, as here in Canada, the persistent mantra is of a return to “normal” and “business as usual,” which means the end or suspension of even basic measures to protect the most vulnerable among us, and to keep each other safe. 

More than 500 people became billionaires and more than 150 million people moved into the numbers of extreme poverty. 

In a report issued several weeks ago, the UN Secretary-General says the world's biggest carbon emitters must start drastically cutting emissions within the next 36 weeks to avert climate catastrophe.2 The weeks are counting down with no action taken. 

These crises summon the power of the call of something like renewal. 

3.

I’ve called this Against Renewal and I mean it as a provocation and an invitation to think, imagine, be, and do differently in the spaces where we find ourselves and in the midst of so much that is catastrophic that the idea, the promise, of renewal sounds like a lifeline. (This is true, even if, we also find joy and tenderness and manage to do good and meaningful work in these spaces, through it all.) 

Metaphorically and materially the languages and modalities of renewal often mask and abstract continued use that is sometimes, even oftentimes, violent, and certainly extractive.  

Think of: Urban renewal—which has so often displaced black and brown and poor people—renewal by way of displacement and ejection of unwanted, underserved, and overpoliced populations to make way for others. 

Or Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion initiatives which are so often structured to fail and most certainly to defer radical change by incorporating the institution’s others into existing structures and frameworks. EDI and its various other nomenclatures operate on the logic of renewal that is really one of fungibility, incorporation, and exhaustion. 

Many of our metaphors falter: Think renewable energy, for example, which often relies on rare earth elements that are used across a range of technologies to generate this “cleaner, renewable energy”: wind turbine magnets, solar cells, smartphone components, and the cells used in electric vehicles, among others. 

Who is doing that work of extracting the minerals? Who is risking their lives in order to try to live? Who is at risking of being trapped, dying, or being murdered? Whose lives are at risk for the renewables that are not available to them and the mining of which also means the polluting of water sources and the earth, and the creation of cancer clusters and more?  

The languages of livability often produce more unlivability; the logics of renewal produce renewed devastation and ongoing exhaustion.  

Another word for this renewal is resilience. 

Another still, self-care. 

Example: I was part of the exhibition project and process for Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (2021) at the MoMA, in which the work that the curators, architects, and advisory board did made and held space. However in the end the museum did not change.  

The incredible project we developed was swiftly replaced by Automania, a show on automotive design and culture, which would run for much longer. As Olalekan Jeyifous recently tweeted: ”It is SO ironic how our show, shortest of its kind by half, will be replaced by one on cars: Automania. A veritable [highway] plowing thru the show like many thru Black hoods in every major US city.”3

But then there was this: a writer and his son, both black, went to the Reconstructions show and in his review the writer reveals his seven-year-old son’s response to the show: “Where is this? Is it real? Is it a video game? Can we go there?”4

What is the horizon of renewal? What are its grammars? 

4.

What might it mean to think/imagine/insist on renewal (mostly imagined as a kind of return to normal) in the midst of catastrophe? More importantly what might it DO to think/imagine/insist on renewal? Sylvia Wynter tells us that the work of deciphering the meaning of a work and deciphering what it is that a work does are not the same practice.5 

My worry is that in one direction, renewal becomes a fetishized notion of something called resilience or self-care.  

For example, the call for Black and Queer and Trans and Brown and poor and people without papers and Indigenous people (this is not a full list) to be resilient is an insult. It is violence—violence to call on people to respond to structural violence without changing the sources of it. (I am wary of overusing the word violence but I know this to be violence.) 

As Kaiama Glover once reminded me, part of the definition of the noun resilience is not only “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness”6 but also the ability to return to that shape that one, or the object, was in before the difficulty, or injury, occurred.7

The goal is to eliminate structures that cause and perpetuate harm; not to make ourselves rebound from continuing harm. 

And then there is self-care but not self-care as Audre Lorde meant it but its misappropriated, de-politicized, de-radicalized form. Renewal deployed via self-care.  

This iteration of renewal is atomized, individualized, and in the end recuperative of white supremacy and the institution.   

Example: There is an ongoing struggle among Black and Asian American medievalists who have been targeted by alt-medievalists and their “liberal” counterparts. A recent instance involved attacks on Professor Mary Rambaran-Olm around—but not only around—her review of a recent book. In the midst of this a white woman who is implicated in the matter notifies people that she is not responding because she is going on vacation—writing, “Trying that ‘self care’ thing Audre Lorde was talking about and that.”8 A reference to Audre Lorde on self-care is offered as the reason for her silence in the face of antiblackness. Lorde is used in order to excuse antiblackness in the name of [white] self-care. White self-care in the interest of sustaining the antiblack status quo. 

What Lorde actually wrote is: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”9

The care of the self that Lorde so carefully invoked was in the interests of countering “the devastating effects of overextension” toward having a self that was able to rejoin a collective struggle for liberation. 

5.

I want to insist that we refuse renewal on the terms that have been offered to us within the neoliberal university (or the museum or gallery): atomizing and individuating as if the challenges that we face are personal and not relations of coloniality, structural, intentional, and managed.   

This version of renewal has a limited horizon—which is the current capitalist and heteropatriarchal order and its extension, its renewal.  

What would we want to renew? US democracy? The US Supreme Court? Policing? This conception of renewal offers no challenge or threat to white supremacy.   

When we look at the creation of EDI positions and offices and the movement of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American, disabled, and other racialized and queer and trans and nonbinary folks into these administrative positions we often encounter people who really want to make change. They are people who want the university to be a different university or who want the art institution (museum or gallery) to be a different art institution but, counter to their individual desires and actions, these positions that are offered and narrated as gains leave the world-as-it-is, intact.10

Part of anything that I want to name as renewal has also got to be a refusal of inclusion into what is. Real renewal has to be reimagining and engaging other ways of doing one’s work. In relation to the North American university, the against in my title was my attempt to name a relation, to name proximity and friction. We might refuse to be renewed only in order to return to the same structural position. Because as Dylan Rodriguez writes, “Despite and as a result of showcase diversity measures, "research universities" continue to be fortresses of epistemic and administrative white supremacy/antiblackness/coloniality.”11

Despite and as a result of. 

6.

What does renewal do, now? 

Sometimes the obstacles that we face in doing our individual and collective work are couched as invitations. We confront this in and out of “the academy” in relation to renewal. It appears in the ways as it is so often conceived and offered, it falls entirely short of the mark; it fails to realize how the university (or the art institution) functions.  

The university will use you up; the university will not love you; the university will not fundamentally change because the university is not a radical place; the university is an arm of the state, is a corporation, is an instrument of capital. 

We cannot proceed as if we believe that ushering marginalized people into the existent structure is renewal. As people of colour, to quote Dionne Brand and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson in Temporary Spaces of Joy and Freedom: “We constantly make concessions to white supremacy by yes, accepting remediation instead of liberation. Concessions to, and characterizations by the state instead of the demand for our full lives.”12

7.

Our full lives. 

A key word in my title is that preposition—against.  

As in:  

in opposition to. 

in or into physical contact with (something), so as to be supported by or collide with it. 

in anticipation of and preparation for.  

If we don’t cede the question of renewal or the project of renewal or the promise of renewal, and we might not want to cede it, what might it look like?  

My thought is to tarry with the preposition, to struggle with it, in order to think with and against renewal’s own temporalities in and out of the academy. 

We might take this as an invitation, to reject accommodation to tyranny and to work instead for the annihilation of tyranny—that would renew us.  

What if we imagine and enact a different set of relations, where we think and work toward another kind of university through which we could shed some of that tiredness that necessitates modes of being often called self-care (as individualized). What is individual wellness in an ill system? 

8.

Temporalities 

I am thinking about the pace of things. I’ve also been caught up in University time, book-writing time, teaching and class preparation time, putting out fires time, emergency time, keep moving time. 

We are all exhausted. And rightly so. I am exhausted. The demands on our time have not diminished. In fact, for many of us they have increased as we contend with unclear, contradictory, piecemeal, and often insufficient responses to COVID-19 in the places where we work and the states, nations, and municipalities where we live. 

**** 

At some point during the early days of restrictions on movement for everyone but those people doing what was called “front line work,” I suggested on Twitter by way of thinking out loud with people that we might have to move from solidarity to something like distributed risk.  

We might, then, think renewal as a form of distributed risk that is about commitments to each other (and our students and colleagues and to our work) and not to an institution.  

What if we tarry with renewal in that mode—what if we renew our commitments to each other? What if we carry forward and multiply projects like Scholars Strike Canada?—which was an important (and archived) gathering of scholars and activists from across the place called Canada who organized and came together to think through our current urgent challenges and our opportunities for connection and change. It was a clarifying call to action. It was renewal as a determined wading into. 

What might renewal in that direction activate? What might that conception of renewal’s political horizons, its new temporalities, and modalities, be?  

Wading as refusal of the logics of our domination and diminution. 



Christina Sharpe is a writer, Professor, and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University.  She is also a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class, University of Johannesburg, and a Matakyev Research Fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University.  Sharpe is the author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2010) and In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016). Her third book Ordinary Notes will be published in Canada by Knopf. Her critical introduction to Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems of Dionne Brand will be published in fall 2022. She is working on two books: Black. Still. Life. (2025) and To Have Been to the End of the World: 25 Essays on Art.

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