On colonial exceptionality,neoliberal coloniality,and legal interruptions

Recent Puerto Rican history has been marked by a continuity of disasters and a multilayered political, financial, economic, and humanitarian crisis. From the public debt crisis in 2006; to the Puerto Rico (PR) government's bankruptcy in 2016; to the approval of the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) by the US Congress in 2016; to the devastating Hurricanes Irma and María in 2017; to the earthquakes in 2020; to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, PR's recent history is defined by an ‘economy of catastrophe or a catastrophe by attrition’ (Zambrana, 2021, p. 54). It is precisely in this context, that Rocío Zambrana's Colonial Debts aims to provide a decolonial and feminist reading of the public debt crisis, and the political economy of coloniality in PR. To do so, Zambrana engages with critical theory, decolonial feminist thought, the work of Maurizio Lazzarato, and various Puerto Rican scholars and activist groups. Debt is described as a social, economic, political—and I would add legal—relationship. According to Zambrana, debt operates as an apparatus of capture, predations, dispossession, and expulsion that binds together creditor-debtor, colonizer-colonized, and austerity with tax-haven economy. As Zambrana puts it, debt actualizes a race/gender/class hierarchy by marking populations as culpable, hence disposable.

The book is structured on two key paradigms: operation and interruption. Operation, Zambrana suggests, seeks to name ‘the effectivity of an apparatus, the norms, political-economy, and modes of perceiving, sensing, and desiring that articulate the world of capital/coloniality’ (p. 11). Chapters 1 to 3 are devoted to the analysis of the operation of debt as an apparatus of capture. Specifically, in Chapter 2, Zambrana conceptualizes colonial exceptionality and neoliberal coloniality to underscore the juridico-political structures and material operations of debt in PR.

Interruption seeks to define the attempts to make coloniality inoperative. Drawing from critical theorists such as, Walter Benjamin, Rita Segato, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Zambrana aims to elucidate the ways in which the operativity of neoliberal slow death can be interrupted. The book engages with a series of protests that, accordingly, sought ‘to seize the life anew, organizing life in its very reproduction anew, and unbinding the world posited by capital/coloniality’ (p. 12). Chapter 4 and the conclusion explore the ways in which decolonial praxis can generate concrete forms of interruption.

I am particularly interested in the place that law and legality occupy in Colonial Debts’ cartography of the ‘no-place’ of debt and, consequently, Puerto Rican contemporary history. Specifically, I am interested in exploring how the law and exceptionality become central configurations in the operativity of colonial debts. Therefore, my aim in this short essay is to succinctly engage with Zambrana's conceptualization of Colonial Exceptionality, Neoliberal Coloniality, and (Legal)Interruptions.

Zambrana introduces the concept of colonial exceptionality to account for the operation of coloniality in PR. This concept is in dialogue with a series of works and reflections on the state of exception and its articulations in PR (e.g. Atiles 2016, 2018, 2020). These works and reflections build a colonial understanding of Agamben's paradigm of the state of exception. In so doing, they aim to demonstrate how the sociolegal and juridico-political configuration of PR within the US constitutional and juridical system was largely based on exceptional logics and practices of inclusive-exclusion. Furthermore, those reflections demonstrate that the logic of exceptionality poses biopolitical/necropolitical and geopolitical dimensions. Together, they show that the colonial state of exception in PR is the constitutive paradigm of US colonialism in PR.

A reader familiar with the state of exception traditions might notice that the concept of colonial exceptionality is indirectly in dialogue with the works of critical scholars such as Hussain (2003), Jimenez (2020), Morton (2013), Ong (2006), Reynolds (2017), and Weheliye (2014), among others. Despite Colonial Debts not engaging with this theoretical corpus, the book can be read in the light of such tradition. For example, one of the key arguments developed in Chapter 2 and the conclusion is that colonial exceptionality ‘is the site of a state of emergency that is not the exception but the rule’. This statement is largely accepted among the exceptionality and colonialism scholarships from Mbembe (2003), Nader (2007), Thiong’o (2011) to Santos (2007). Furthermore, one of the key arguments posed by Reynolds (2017) is that the logic of exception in the colonies enables the normalization of violence as mechanism to administer everyday life. Reynolds has pointed out that exceptionality and violence always operates along the lines of race, gender, and class. Similarly, Jimenez (2020) has demonstrated the racial dimension of the American state of exception in PR. Thus, the concept of colonial exceptionality comes less as a new interpretation of exceptionality, and more as restatement of what has been largely agreed upon in the established scholarship of the state of exception and colonialism, Puerto Rican and global south studies.

Colonial Debts poses an important question about the centrality of sovereignty in the accounts of the colonial state of exception, which remains an important challenge to scholars concerned with the law, the sociolegal analysis of state power, and exceptionality. Zambrana invites the readers to reflect on exceptionality without narrowly centering sovereign power or Schmitt's decisionism. That is, conceptualizations of sovereignty as inherently tight to the decision on the exception, and/or as Schmitt (2005:5) puts it ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception’. Colonial Debts’ central argument is that narrowly defining the state of exception within the realm of the juridico-political renders spurious debates on the question of Puerto Rican status which neither addresses nor proposes a real decolonization of PR. Alas, the book invites the reader to disentangle sovereignty from decisionism, and exceptionality.

Similarly, the book suggests that stripping legality and sovereignty from exceptionality could render a better understanding of coloniality. This is a paradoxical moment in the argumentation, since stripping legality from exceptionality is the constitutive dimension of what Walter Benjamin calls the ‘real state of exception’. The state of exception as the rule and the real state of exception—two different dimensions of exceptionality according to Benjamin—can be lost in the analysis of exceptionality. Thus, the real state of exception, as described by Benjamin, entails a radical proposal for the interruption of the temporal continuity of law and the state of exception as the rule. It is perhaps the moment in which ‘Organized Pessimism’ materialized in real action.

Drawing from the concept of colonial exceptionality, Zambrana develops the concept of neoliberal coloniality. The concept of neoliberal coloniality aims to critically engage with the operation of neoliberalism and slow death in PR. The author argues that ‘… tracking material conditions and effects of an economy of catastrophe call for an account of the environment generated by neoliberal coloniality: the spectacular and quotidian violence that composes the ordinary in the no-place of life in the indebted colony’ (p. 70-1). This is an important concept, which invites the readers to decenter the law, local elites, financial institutions, and the local government and its declaration of the state of emergency from the analysis of colonial debts. Accordingly, engaging with colonial debts entails moving from the financial to the historical debts. ‘This shift makes possible more than linking financial debt to government corruption or, more generally, the political economy of PR under US colonial rule’ (p. 15). By specifying the work of debts as a form of neoliberal coloniality, Zambrana connects current financial debts with the reinstallation of a race/gender/class hierarchy in the colony (p. 15). Thus, the invitation is to understand the impact of colonial debts by centering the material consequences and the manifestation of indebted life in the colony.

Colonial Debts puts forward an important question about the desirability of abandoning the law, since social movements and grassroots organizations can articulate the law to their benefit. In a move that I have termed Legal Interruptions, the book echoes the tradition of strategic litigations and legal mobilizations. This question is important and constitutes one of the challenges that many social mobilizations across the global south and north have faced ¹ . To demonstrate the importance of the law in certain protests, Colonial Debts analyzes important sociopolitical cases such as the students’ strike at the University of Puerto Rico, grassroots organizations conducting land rescue and occupations of public buildings, and the debates about Reparations.

Abandoning the law, I have argued, entails decentering it as a category of analysis that aims to explain the Puerto Rican colonial subordination. That is, I have argued for the need to abandon the law as the epistemic apparatus that subsumes all possible analysis of Puerto Rican history to the legal field. In my own work I have acknowledged the importance of legal mobilizations and strategic litigations in the context of impoverished and vulnerable communities, as well as in the context of specific Puerto Rican pro-independence and anti-colonial mobilizations. Nevertheless, the complexity of this analysis is somewhat lost in Colonial Debts. Thus, an adequate account of abandoning the law in the context of PR could reveal that this proposition entails a radical form of interruption, one that goes beyond legality and legal interruptions.

The sophistication of the analysis presented in this book is without doubt one of the strengths of Zambrana's engagement with coloniality and Puerto Rican contemporary history. This analysis operates at two levels: (1) the theoretical richness and extraordinary potent formulation of analytic categories; (2) multiple description of decolonial praxis and interruptions. Conversely there is an important gap when it comes to engagement with the legal and material processes that propitiated the Puerto Rican downturn and catastrophe (or neoliberal coloniality). There is very limited engagement with the study of the concrete manifestation or materiality that made possible the public debt. Despite Colonial Debts engaging in a Foucauldian understanding of the state, one could argue that the process, corrupt financial practices, and laws that made possible the current downturn need to be accurately described.

As I mentioned before, debt is also a legal apparatus. Therefore, as a legal apparatus, debt is sustained on legal violence, the promise of punishment and/or the promise that if not paid, legal violence in its different modalities will be implemented to ensure its repayments. One could argue that the abstraction and theoretical engagements with debt underscored the analysis of the Puerto Rican case. How can one understand the coloniality of debt in PR, without looking at the process that made possible such debt? Or without especially looking at the role of law, politicians, banks, and other actors that actively created the debt, and that now impose austerity measures to repay the public debt? In a sense, the necropolitical power or the material condition of coloniality cannot be only understood in the aftermath of the catastrophe but needs to be understood in the constitution and configuration of a regimen of governmentality that manufactured the condition for the catastrophe. Certainly, legal violence, corrupt sovereign practices, and exceptionality were at the center of this process; why not identify these legal practices that manufactured the colonial catastrophe?