Anthropocentric Limits of Community: Relation as a Black and Indigenous Ethic

Although community psychology’s unsettling of the psych complex ushered psychological reform, its potentialities are stymied by an inability to grapple with the black and indigenous deathworlds and failure to think beyond anthropocentric preoccupations. Part of community psychology’s problem is the conception of community it is working with. This means that it is rapidly falling behind conceptual horizons opened by black studies, indigenous studies, and environmental humanities. In this chapter, I problematise the conceptual and imaginative shortcomings of community and offer Édouard Glissant’s concept of relation as a more expansive conceptual framework. I contend that this move potentially reorients community psychology towards the more boundless possibilities of black, indigenous, and multispecies worldmaking. I suggest that this requires the demolition of the colonial walls between the putatively human, the natural world, and innumerable deathworlds occupied by the countless black dead towards a multispecies and planetary orientation. Located in the black and indigenous worlds, the chapter teases out the possibilities of suturing community psychology to strands of indigenous studies, black studies and the planetary.