Session 10: “Community Among Ourselves”
Thanks, as always, to everyone who made it to the last session of the AGAPE Seminar & Studio and to the many present-absences who shaped the session’s proceedings.
I am sad to say that, once again, there will be four weeks between the last session and the next session. This time the pause will be due to the fact that I will be busy facilitating the BADS_lab in Chicago from May 10 - 20. If you can be in Chicago during that time, you are all welcome and encouraged to participate in the public events that will be part of the BADS_lab, which will touch on much of the study that we’ve been doing together.
Upcoming Session Date: 26 May 2024
Start Time : 10:30 LA / 13:30 NYC / 14:30 São Paulo / 18:30 London / 19:30 Berlin / 20:30 Dar es Salaam / 23:00 Delhi
End Time: 12:30 LA / 15:30 NYC / 16:30 São Paulo / 20:30 London / 21:30 Berlin / 22:30 Dar es Salaam / 01:00 Delhi
Background Readings for the Next Session:
“Planning & Policy” from The Undercommons by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney
“Defamiliarizing the ‘Negro’s Enjoyment’”, “Politics without Proper Locus”, & “Stealing Away — the Space of Struggle, and the Non-autonomy of Practice” from Scenes of Subjection by Saidiya Hartman
”The Family: Our Beloved Crisis", a lecture by Hortense Spillers
On the one hand, we have to deal with the fact that we are heirs to the legacies of those who acquiesced to and advanced the logics and logistics of empire, war, and accumulation by dispossession, denigration, and devastation.
On the other hand, we have to deal with the fact that we are also heirs to the legacies of those who resisted and rebelled against the logics and logistics of empire, war, and accumulation by dispossession, denigration, and devastation.
The difficulty that confronts as we deal with these two facts is this: the legacies of convivial resistance and rebellion that we are heir to are not as easily transmitted across generations as those of colonial acquiescence and advancement. Actually, it is worse than that: neither of these legacies are being effectively transmitted across generations but, instead, what is being transmitted are wishful and defensive fantasies that disguise forms of colonial acquiescence and advancement as forms of convivial resistance and rebellion, such that each successive generation confronts more and more confusion than the last. As Kris Manjapra writes in Colonialism in Global Perspective, “The colonial force animated by racial capitalism is not just practiced with guns, swords, and pen, but also with smoke and mirrors.” Nowhere is the deployment of smoke and mirrors more apparent than in Empire’s attempts to muddle the transmission of traditions of convivial resistance and rebellion.
Knowing that it will take a number of generations to dismantle racial capitalist Empire as it stands now, after nearly six centuries of genocides, ethnocides, and ecocides, a major problem that we need to ask and answer is this: how can we transmit traditions of convivial resistance and rebellion down from one generation to the next with attention and intention in spite of the machinations of Empire that compel us to forget them.
Drawing upon personal experiences, we reflected upon the burdens that are placed on youthful activists to take initiative and risks without the support of experienced activists, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the inability of experienced activists to transmit histories of struggle and material practices of struggle from one generation to the next. These appeared to us to be two sides of the same cutting edge of counter-insurgency operations against the invention of radical traditions of resistance and rebellion.
That being said, we also recognized that, in spite of Empire’s machinations against the invention of radical traditions, something is still being transmitted from generation to generation. There is some kind of continuity to be had, and we wondered at that. One thing that became clear to us as we wondered was this: where trans-generational communal bonds are strong, more is transmitted and there is greater continuity; where trans-generational communal bonds are weak, less is transmitted and continuity falters. Echoing the seventh-generation principle articulated in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s chapter on the “Honorable Harvest”, trans-generational communal bonds appeared to us to be simultaneously the medium and the message with respect to the transmission radical traditions of resistance and rebellion. Ay, and the phrase, “think not of yourself, but of the seventh generation”, was not simply a uni-directional projection forward in time, but a bi-directional projection seven generations backwards and seven generations forward.
All of this begged a few questions, however, “What do we mean by the term community? What makes community for us? Who are we? What makes us?”
