While oftentimes misunderstood and, further, mischaracterized in academic and public discourse, identity politics in its contemporary or lay understanding has produced a host of “morbid consequences” for both theory and theorist oriented toward its advancement in the original sense. This reality has created some difficulty for theoretical integration across domains for use in novel theory development, empirical research, and professional practice. Additionally, the traditional lifecycle of theory–inclusive of the ways we move on from it as participants in intellectual communities–sometimes seems unavailable to those theoretical perspectives under the identity politics umbrella. This paper first considers the aforementioned reality through the lens of intersectionality, a commonly invoked black feminist critical social theory. I utilize intersectionality as a theoretical case study to examine claims of originalism (Nash, 2016), insufficiency (Hutchinson, 2001), and a discourse grounded in the need to “move on” from intersectionality as a framework. Following this reflection, I then consider what a politics of departure might look like in the face of calls from the political left and the right to leave all identity politics behind. This politics of departure includes both an ethics of ritualized burial in addition to a repurposing of the theoretical components that remain generative, all in the service of detailing what an emerging ontology of theoretical discard may mean for the intellectual labor of politically-oriented psychologists.

There exists a long history of institutional disregard and denial of the theoretical contributions that scholars from marginalized communities have brought to the disciplines of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and art. These theoretical offerings simultaneously challenge violent, antiquated epistemologies and build liberated foundations from which constructions of a new university emerge. Yet, Black, queer, mad, and disabled bodyminds have been relegated to “fungible commodity” for the neoliberal university to extract and repurpose these radical and embodied theories for professional and institutional promotion. In the midst of this morbid consumption of fleshly theory, the critical examination of old theories (including those that have pushed us intellectually and politically further) is abandoned in what Christina Sharpe names “in the wake,” but in these cases without a funeral. Utilizing Black Feminist Hauntology, Black psychology, and decolonial philosophical approaches to conceptualizations of time, I explore how these frameworks, through the use of interdisciplinary art, Black literature, and public health travesties like the 1980s and 1990s AIDS crisis teach us how to attend to the dead and dying, and how rituals of care can restore life to Black theories and bodyminds that Western thought has traditionally confined to the realm of hauntings.

The present inquiry critically analyzes how benevolent colonialism impacts theories, urban planning initiatives, and organizing frameworks at the intersection of abolition, climate and environmental justice, and the political ecology of waste. To illustrate this critical analysis, and ground the investigation in material reality, I examine the colonial history of mass incarceration and environmental racism in so-called New York City; centering the evolution of the Empire State’s carceral archipelago from 19th century petitions addressing pollution and toxic waste hazards on Rikers Island to the Renewable Rikers project currently in development. Drawing on the work of Lauren Fournier who, in Fermenting Feminism as Methodology and Metaphor: Approaching Transnational Feminist Practices through Microbial Transformation, proposes that “fermentation is a generative metaphor, a material practice, and a microbiological process through which feminisms might be reenergized,” I argue that non-anthropocentric composting, or nutrient cycling, is a generative metaphor through which liberatory movement work might be reenergized and theoretically rehabilitated through anti-colonial lenses. By way of careful decomposition and intentional recompositon of theories, urban planning initiatives, and organizing frameworks at the intersection of abolition, climate and environmental justice, and the political ecology of waste, I offer Freedom Dreams from the Compost Pile; in conversation with Fred Moten and the “radical surrealist publications” that revealed “the evolution of a sophisticated anticolonial stance as well as a vision of a postcolonial future.” Ultimately, I explain why abolitionist praxis is incomplete at best and violent at worst outside of an explicitly LANDBACK organizing model.