The epistemological intimacies of the urban frontier: mangrove swamps, possessive (non)belonging and kinship (m)otherwise

Abstract

In this article I (t)race the (onto)epistemological intimacies of the urban frontier through their attempted erasure and annihilation of the Bla(c)k, Indigenous and racialised (m)other and her rendition to non-being and non-belonging in the city of Mulubinba-Newcastle on the unceeded lands of the Worimi and Awabakal peoples in so called Australia and in relation to the complex lineages and herstories of exile, displacement, dispossession and desire and survivance which bring my kin and I to these lands. A crisis in home and homeplace is thus not new for the racialised mother, it is foundational to the hetero-patriarchal modern (settler) colonial project. I do not, could never, stop here but rather I foreground ongoing Indigenous sovereignties and a political project of nurturing and revival of kinship (m)otherwise as a powerful Black axis upon which the urban might be decolonised and Indigenised in complex inter-cultural and inter-generational ways and as pluridiverse relations and relationality.