Mobile Commoning: Reclaiming Indigenous, Caribbean, Maroon, and Migrant Commons

Abstract

Over the last two decades, the concept of ‘the commons’ has been rediscovered as a powerful organizing principle in social movements, radical political thought, and critical theory. The concept of commoning has also been adopted within discussions of migration and critical mobilities research. This article will first trace some of these emerging ideas of commoning as a relational practice found in many political mobilizations around ‘reclaiming the commons’. Then it will turn to approaches to commoning that seek to complicate Euro-American histories by centering Indigenous practices of radical commoning, Caribbean and African diaspora mobile commoning, and recent concepts such as undercommons, queer commons, and migrant mobile commoning. The article asks: How can such practices of radical mobile commoning help us envision ways to unmake the existing violent settlings and destructive im/mobilities of enclosure, coloniality, imperialism, and capitalist extraction?