“People getting together.” This is a phrase that comes up early and often in Organize Your Own: The Politics and Poetics of Self-Determination Movements (Soberscove, 2017). In the introduction to the book, Daniel Tucker, the curator of the exhibition and … Continue reading “A Politics of Dissonance”
Whoever pride in the face I went for a ride with my friend on the shore of our news where all the objects were and there was no waste to love or be an end for politics in the fantasy … Continue reading “Comrade Love and Comrade Spell”
British election nights have followed a certain pattern for decades. The polling stations close at 10 p.m. The ballot boxes are delivered to municipal sports halls across the country, where local government employees count the votes through the night, before … Continue reading “British Election Nights, Despair, and Hope: A Personal History”
“What if we’re living in a world full of super-social psychopaths?” is the question posed by Tristam Vivian Adams early on in his book The Psychopath Factory: How Capitalism Organizes Empathy. Scary, as the term “psychopath” immediately triggers thoughts about … Continue reading “A New Diagnosis for Capitalism: Tristam Vivian Adams’ The Psychopath Factory“
1. “No matter how much you feel it, you want To feel it even more.” That’s the feeling Tony Bennett says he sees in Amy Winehouse when they meet to record “Body & Soul” in March 2011 For Bennett’s album … Continue reading “Popular Culture”
Note: Since April 25, 2017, eight graduate teachers who are members of UNITE HERE Local 33 have engaged in The Fast Against the Slow, a fast to move the Yale administration to negotiate. For more details, see https://www.facebook.com/local33unitehere/ The global … Continue reading “What Does One Do In the Face of a Lawless Administration?”
All journalists and commentators predicted that the first round of the French presidential elections could bring about real surprises; but, in fact, it didn’t. Well, at least not really. Of course, with the qualification of Macron and Le Pen, it … Continue reading “French Elections: The Hour of Danger”
“Slavery, America’s original sin” is one of the most common ways in which human bondage is invoked in journalism, punditry, and popular history today. What is suggested by this theological metaphor for a brutal history of exploitation—and where does it … Continue reading ““Original Sin,” Slavery, and American Innocence”
Journalist Farhad Manjoo describes the “post-fact society” as “a parallel universe of fact: a place at once part of the mainland but profoundly distant from it, a place where another truth—a truth pocked with holes, but one just true enough … Continue reading “Nonknowledge as Capacity: Randy Martin’s Knowledge LTD and the Limits of Rationality in the Age of the Derivative”
Marquis Bey interviews Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of the poetry collection Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity. Read an excerpt from book here. Marquis Bey: So I want to begin, if I may, expressing to you how utterly thankful I … Continue reading “A Spillage of the Fugitive Variety”
Duke University Press has allowed us to publish an excerpt from Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ fantastic new book Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity, which can be purchased here. These passages come from a chapter titled “How She Survived Until Then.” … Continue reading “From Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity“
They were ex-cons and grad students, fractious Bolsheviks and urban castaways, rock-throwers and pot-smokers, juggalos and candy kids. They were people angry at their chances or at someone else’s. They were there because they were trying to make art about … Continue reading “Michael Jackson”
1. On Genre Flailing In a crisis we engage in genre flailing so that we don’t fall through the cracks of knowledge and noise into suicide or psychosis. In a crisis we improvise like crazy, where “like crazy” is a … Continue reading “Big Man”
On December 4th of last year, Italians voted “no” in a referendum on constitutional reforms that would have allowed Parliament to make bills into laws without Senate approval. A date that for the proponents of the reform should have ushered … Continue reading “The “No You Can’t” of Italian Neo-Marxist Dissent”
When I asked the instructors of Tolstoy College if they found anything contradictory about establishing an anarchist college funded by the state of New York, they all kind of shrugged it off. Peter Murphy, who taught courses on radical history, … Continue reading “Tolstoy College: The War and Peace of an Anarchist Education”
