Session 1: “In the wake…”
I’d like to begin by marking a distinction that I think will be very helpful for us throughout this seminar and study group: the distinction between (i) an ideology, (ii) a process, (iii) the product of a process, and (iv) the wake of a process.
The Sublime Art of Making Reparations
When I use the term reparations, I am referring to an art of making amends rather than a science of finding equivalents. Indeed, I am actually referring to a very specific art of making amends that eschews the finding of equivalents: the sublime art of making reparations, as I imagine it, is the art of kintsugi writ large as a metaphor for radical cultural transformation.
Four Autobiographical Notes
We can only make sense of the most spectacular genocidal and ethnocidal horrors of colonial racial capitalism after we have illuminated the “terror[s] of the mundane and quotidian” from which these spectacular horrors emerge.
Where Are We Now? (cont’d)
Given where we find ourselves today, much more attention ought to be paid to the making of what bell hooks termed “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” from out of pre-existing imperialist patriarchies, because the emergence of the former from out of the latter was not a foregone conclusion but, rather, a much contested process, and the contestations of that process have left their mark on the "successful" result.
Where Are We Now?
Reflecting upon the publication of my new book, Twin Killers: Dispatches Against Global Apartheid & Planetary Ecocide, this dispatch sets the stage for future endeavors by summarizing the picture of the prevailing world system that I have been painting here on the (De-/Re-)Constructing Worlds blog over the course of the past two years, as my abstract theoretical writings gave way to more historical and contextual writings.
Investigations into the Modern University - “The Global University”
No university can become a global university without the backing of an imperial nation-state and/or (neo-)colonial corporate enterprise. And the reverse is equally true: imperial nation-states and (neo-)colonial corporate enterprises need global universities to administer knowledges in ways that maintain and advance their own aims and interests.
Making Sense of Revolutionary Love
Revolutionary lovers and maternals are those who refuse to acquiesce to captivity and, instead, love and nurture their kin in ways that undermine the forces and power formations that make people into chattel slaves, wage slaves, and colonized subjects.
The Therapeutic Imagination
The Therapeutic imagination is patiently attentive: it encourages us to take time to attend to what is taking place in order to take careful and caring action with respect to what is taking place.
The Therapeutic imagination knows no superheroes but the most under-appreciated healers of the victims and vehicles of evil.
Denigration & Dispossession
Breaking with my dependence on Marxist language and theory by jettisoning the sorry Marxist concept and turn of phrase “primitive accumulation” and, instead, thinking with and through the phrase and concept of “accumulation by denigration and dispossession”.
U.S. Militarism
Everyone struggling against global apartheid and planetary ecocide today knows that the most reprehensible of villains today are U.S. militarists and the global military-industrial-academic complexes that both feed U.S. militarism and feast on it
The Fetishes of Empire
Few recognize and fewer are brave enough to teach others that the maintenance and advancement of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy has not been driven by profit but by pleasure seeking, toxic masculine pleasure seeking.
Against Global Apartheid & Planetary Ecocide (A.G.A.P.E.)
Struggling for the nurture and care of the beautiful and differentiated languages, cultures, customs, and ways of life of the Earth’s people, which are vital to the health of the planet.
Unpayable Debt & the Assassination of the Third World
Radical Pan-Africanists, whose prescient analyses of U.S. led Empire are too often left out of histories of the Long Twentieth Century, clearly saw the Assassination of the Third World project for what it was, the institution of a global apartheid regime secured and underwritten in perpetuity by the servicing of unpayable debts.
Investigations into the Modern University - “Global Affairs”
The second of a series of dispatches titled “Investigations into the Modern University”, this dispatch identifies three fronts where radicals ought to be confronting the colonial ambitions of the modern university: the Global Student front, the Global Research front, and the Global Service front.
Twin Killers: Global Apartheid & Planetary Ecocide
In which I sit down with friends, Greg Saunier and Sophie Daws, to discuss the background for an upcoming series of dispatches on the Twin Killers, Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide.
Practical Projects
The theoretical, contextual, and historical writings that form the bulk of the work that is documented on this site are supplements to (and are supplemented by) various doings and makings; the writings serve as relays between many different practical projects that I am engaged in.
Here you will find brief descriptive introductions to my ongoing practical projects, alongside links to more demonstrative introductions to my projects and the reference texts that relay between them.
White Amerikkkaners
As I conversed and corresponded with my readers, I noticed that many of them were de-contextualizing and de-historicizing my work, willfully ignoring the apocalyptic events that have shaped our world and, in turn, informed my work.
Unsurprisingly, most of the readers who maintained such willful ignorance to context and history happened to be white Americans.
“Toward a Global Idea of Race”
A gloss on Silva’s Toward a Global Idea of Race, leaving aside her disputations with the history of Western philosophy, anthropology, and sociology, and focusing on the problem which inspired me to pick up the book in the first place.
The problem in question, “How do liberal globalists and white supremacists relate to one another?”
“Countering Power” w/ Greg Saunier and Sophie Daws
In which I sit down with friends, Greg Saunier and Sophie Daws, to discuss my dispatch "Countering Power" and explicate the thesis that "all power is power to mediate".
On Violence
Marking the distinction between brutal acts of violence and considerate acts of violence, between the violence enacted by oppressors and oppressive regimes and the violence enacted by freedom fighters and liberation movements.