Not Going Anywhere: Local Protests as Post-global Politics MADHUMITA LAHIRI The Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in the United States in 2020 were profoundly shaped by the widespread border closures of the same period. The COVID-19 pan- demic led to extensive restrictions on travel and migration that effectively destroyed the global mobility of persons, and it also created widespread supply chain dis- ruptions that meant that commodities, too, were no longer as globally mobile. Not coincidentally, an insistent and enforced focus on the local marks the political strategies embraced by 2020’s BLM: whereas the BLM protests of 2014, for instance, centered on “Ferguson” as both geographical center and metonymic invocation, 2020’s BLM protests were arguably multicentered, with the tragic extensiveness of anti-Black violence providing several different and locally calibrated foci. The global influence of 2020’s BLM protests has reflected a similar dynamic, as pro- testors in different nations have adopted the multiple concerns of the BLM move- ment toward their localized demands. Indeed, the very analytic that makes BLM so effective is precisely its replication in different specific locations. BLM activists have demonstrated, for instance, the constitutive similarities across George Floyd’s murder by the police in Minneapolis, Breonna Taylor’s murder by the police in Louisville, and Tamir Rice’s murder by the police in Cleveland—or, to trace a dif- ferent pattern, the constitutive similarities (and similar initial impunity) between the murder of Travyon Martin by a civilian in Florida and the murder of Ahmaud Arbery by a civilian in Georgia. Each specific instance, identified by the individual we have lost, proves the larger pattern: this is a locally grounded analysis that builds up to trans-local claims. In providing these examples, I have described what Kenneth Warren has termed the “the rhetorical politics of Black Lives Matter . . . in which intoning the names of an ever-growing list of the victims and of instances of vio- lence produces an expression that seems at once intensely personal and immedi- ately collective” (Warren). We can compare this BLM analytic to that used, for instance, to prove the disproportionate incarceration of Black people in the United States: that critique gains its power from the overall national pattern, which can then be translated back into local instances, rather than starting, as with BLM, with a list of individual names. This iterative energy, I argue, is part of what we canthink of as a “post-global” politics: that is, a movement that reflects a globally informed analysis but none- theless draws only implicitly on ideas of global commonality. Within the strenu- ously bounded world of 2020, the US-based BLM movement does not fit within our familiar categories of the national, the international, and the global. National movements affirm the unity of national space, but BLM insists on its unevenness; internationalism seeks to forge communities across regions and nations, but BLM takes the unity and transportability of “Black” as a given; globalization discourse argues that the world is coming ever-closer together, but BLM lays claim to no such Novel: A Forum on Fiction 55:1 DOI 10.1215/00295132-9615009 Ó 2022 by Novel, Inc. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/55/1/95/1611820/95lahiri.pdf by University of Michigan user on 04 August 2022