Periscope articles and content
Signal and Noise, or the Balcony Scene 5 p.m. on March 22, 2020. The clamor starts near the end of a one-day “Janata Curfew” (People’s Curfew) declared across India by the central government a few days prior to what would … Continue reading “Superimposition: App-Based Contact Tracing in the Indian Pandemic and Its Unexpected Intimacies”
Civil solidarity, a necessary precondition for democratic systems, remains a governing mode for political formations seeking a hegemonic position within democracies. Civil solidarity is marked by claims to an inclusive, normative-universal idea of “we-ness.” As cultural sociologist Jeffrey C. Alexander … Continue reading “Covid and Civil Solidarity”
Image: Leela Venugopal, We All Wait for the Rain Drip, drip, drip. This is life now. The eerie stillness. The bottomless sorrow. The paralyzing numbness. The quiet acceptance. Time stills, life slows. This is how it is playing out. … Continue reading “The Memory Keepers”
With every superstorm, flood, drought, or heatwave, the uneven effects of climate change are made clear. Coastal communities in the poorer nations are displaced from their homelands while wealthy nations move to tighten border restrictions. Private fire services are hired to … Continue reading “Red Natural History: An Introduction”
Nitawahsin was a large empire or nation-state of the Amskapi Piikani and their sister-states, located almost near the center of North America. Its borders were the Saskatchewan River to the north, Yellowstone River to the south, the Rocky Mountains to … Continue reading “The Slow Violence of Natural History”
Indigenous is a misnomer. We are family members, clans, nations, and relatives. We know each other by relation to one another. We have stories about ourselves and the animals and the creatures that no longer live on the planet. This … Continue reading “Dinosaurs, Eugenics, and Collapse: Indigenous Erasure in Natural History”
In his essay “Of Cannibals” (1580), Michel de Montaigne wrote of the recently discovered inhabitants of the so-called New World, “the laws of nature govern them still […] it is a nation wherein there is no manner of traffic, no knowledge … Continue reading “Cooperative Nature”
Geography is a discipline defined by its conceptualization of, and attention to, space and place. Much like other modes of inquiry that have historically emerged from Euro-American perspectives, geography has mobilized reductive conceptualizations of space and place in material projects … Continue reading “Radical Geography: Historical Limits and Future Possibilities in the Context of Indigenous Resurgence”
The academic field of Ethnic Studies is an activist discipline. It was founded through student and community activism, with the purpose of intentionally and explicitly supporting empowerment for marginalized communities and peoples. While it originates most directly from US-based activism … Continue reading “Already Presumed Dead”
This is the time of crisis. In communities all across the world, the roiling heat and flames and the surging seas and storms of the climate crisis are upending lives and communities unabated; the brutality of state and police violence … Continue reading “Red Design and the Green New Deal”
Let us hope that the coronavirus pandemic, as the plague in Ancient Greece before it, results in a paradigmatic historic event such that human conscience becomes attuned to life’s intelligence; such that the Aristotelian syllogism, “all men are mortals,” is … Continue reading “Re-encountering Mother Earth: The Urgent Task of Building Buen Vivir”
The ways we tell big stories of social change are born of the perspectives gained by hindsight, and this story exemplifies such hindsight. The Paradigm Shift that occurred during the twenty-first century emerged from relentless struggles for justice conjoined with … Continue reading “A Possible Decolonized, Indigenized Future”
The contributions to this Social Text Periscope dossier are the outcome of a pandemic year’s worth of online conversations between scholars, artists, and activists on themes related to my 2020 book Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of … Continue reading “Introduction: Revenge Politics, Revenge Economy, Revenge Culture”
In the early twenty-first century, we live in capital’s utopia—not a utopia for particular capitalists, but a utopia for capital itself, where the world is reconfigured to suit its needs, where all values must articulate themselves in its arithmetic. Living … Continue reading “Theses on Revenge Capitalism”
Our god who is good to us orders us to revenge our wrongs. He will direct our arms and aid us. Throw away the symbol of the god of the whites who has so often caused us to weep, and … Continue reading “And the Last Shall be First: On the (Im)possibility of Revenge”
