Empire is not a monolithic institution but an assemblage of abstract and concrete machines—some co-opted from pre-colonial social formations, others with distinctly imperial and colonial origins, and still others emerging from decolonial and counter-colonial resistance, only to be captured and perverted into neo-colonial apparatuses.

Through cultural violence, Empire obscures realities and mystifies histories of resistance, distorting narratives to suppress rebellion. Through its cultural machinery, Empire manufactures a false consensus in which systemic domination is normalized, rebellion is rendered futile, and resistance is framed as dangerous or delusional.

The crisis in Congo is neither recent nor isolated. It cannot be understood apart from Empire’s entrenched legacies of extraction, violence, and control. Over centuries, these forces have repeatedly transformed Congo into a crucible of global exploitation. Congo’s fate offers a grim preview of how power will be contested in other regions without a clear hegemon, where rival blocs vie for dominance by fostering instability and enabling war machines to advance their strategic interests.

This essay redefines Blackness as a condition that both exceeds and honors ancestry. While deeply rooted in shared African descent, Blackness also extends to those whose kinship is analogical and ecological. Black political formations, therefore, are not solely composed of people of African descent but also include those who, under comparable pressures, develop convergent or co-evolving strategies of resistance to racial capitalism’s violence.

This text imagines the making of maroon infrastructures as a world-making practice characterized by four interwoven dimensions: (Administrative) Statements, (Technical) Implements, (Built) Environments, and (Dramatic) Elements. Each dimension plays a vital role in sustaining maroon life amidst conditions of domination and ecological precarity.

This dispatch, written for members of the AGAPE research group, situates U.S.-China competition as a central dynamic in Empire’s mutation, urging critical inquiry into how local and global forms of resistance can exploit and disrupt the fractures within this evolving system. By analyzing the historical, technological, and geopolitical infrastructures that sustain global domination, the text offers insight into how these rivalries shape and exacerbate Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide.

This dispatch explores the interconnected struggles of African peoples—on the continent and throughout the diaspora—centering what Kris Manjapra terms the “Black Ghost of Empire,” a spectral force that calls upon Africans across the diaspora to resist Empire’s systems of domination. It examines how the Scrambles for Africa and successive waves of Euro-American settlement have operated in tandem to sustain global racial hierarchies and economic exploitation.

This dispatch draws critical parallels between the domestic counterinsurgency strategies of post-World War II America and the enduring legacy of colonial military policing in postcolonial nations. By interrogating how tactics of control—originally deployed in imperial conquests—have been repurposed both within U.S. borders and by postcolonial regimes, the text explores the erosion of community self-defense and the transformation of resistance into passive documentation.

Empire relies on physical violence to maintain control, deploying militarized force to threaten, brutalize, and kill rebels while flattening sites of rebellion. This session will explore the history and persistence of militarized repression, drawing on texts like Frantz Fanon’s On Violence and Julian Go’s Policing Empires. Together, we will strategize ways to confront and defend ourselves against such brutality.

Empire is currently consolidating its grip over emerging fractures in its system, adapting to crises of legitimacy and resource depletion. Key areas where Empire is poised to act are outlined in this dispatch, followed by a framework to begin developing maroon countermeasures designed to resist these strategies.

Building on the argument that racial capitalism is a virulent variant of patriarchal imperialism, this dispatch examines the forms of patriarchal violence at its core: rape and femicide. It outlines how these violences have mutated through their co-evolution with the techniques and technologies of racializing rule and the relentless imperatives of capital accumulation.

This dispatch explores how trauma is weaponized to sustain global apartheid, distorting care into complicity with oppression. Using the figures of a white boy witnessing racial violence and a Black girl navigating its aftermath, it examines how trauma conditions individuals to uphold systems of domination.

This dispatch interrogates the mechanisms of control that sustain Empire. It explores how force, the raw application of strength, transitions into power—an insidious and systemic architecture that perpetuates dominance long after Empire’s forces have withdrawn from the battlefield.

Building on The Desertion of Empire, which theorized the refusal of imperial domination, and The Analytics of Raciality, which examined racialized hierarchies in demography, geography, and history, this dispatch explores the intertwined forces of raciality, imperial extraction, and ecological ruin in the Anthropocene.

In preparation for the relaunch of AGAPE in January 2025, here is the second of a series of dispatches revisiting the histories, theories, and proposals explored in our earlier gatherings. This second dispatch analyzes the first of two defining fractures of Empire in our time: the racial fracture. This fracture delineates a global hierarchy of inferior and superior races, with anti-Blackness at its foundation.

In advance of the relaunch of the AGAPE Seminar & Studio in January 2025, the dispatch below digs deep into the crucial distinction between empires and Empire that was drawn in several sessions but never fully explicated in any single session. Drawing together threads from a number of earlier dispatches, this text puts this distinction in historical context and remarks upon its significance to the journey ahead.

After a brief false start in September 2024, the Against Global Apartheid & Planetary Ecocide (AGAPE) Seminar & Studio, is set to relaunch in January 2025, reenergized and ready to deepen its engagement with radical resistance and (re-)creative world-building. This dispatch outlines the outcomes of the first iteration, charts the course for the second, and calls on collaborators to help shape the journey ahead.

In our time, in the era of Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide, what are the freedoms that are denied to peoples by colonialism and racial capitalism? Ay, and how can we form communities that can function as trellises that enable the most abject victims of colonization and racialization to reach those freedoms?

What do we mean by the term community? What makes community for us? Who are we? What makes us?

In curious and troubling ways, we have spent much of our time talking about our responsibilities with regard to our world as if they were individual responsibilities and not responsibilities that are bound with others who are not of our own generation, with our elders and our juniors, with our dead ancestors and our yet-to-be-born descendants.