slavery

Breaking bricks with George Ciccariello-Maher’s Decolonizing Dialectics: Some friendly engagements and reflections

by Matt Evans

What is to be done? This question centers George Ciccariello-Maher’s new book, Decolonizing Dialectics, which addresses racism and colonialism through the works of Georges Sorel, Frantz Fanon, and Enrique Dussel, channelling Marxism in a praxis grounded in explaining colonialism and local conditions of the non-Western world.

The Inauguration of Fascism? Thinking Violence and Resistance in the Age of Trump

– by David Langstaff –
In the wake of Donald Trump’s election, fascism has once again returned to center stage in left political discourse. If we aim to overcome the impasse of left praxis, our theories of fascism and resistance must refuse false dichotomies of race and class, as well as the treating of fascist violence as a radical departure from the normal operations of the liberal democratic state. Fascistic ascendance, as an historically specific manifestation of white nationalist revanchism, cannot be meaningfully apprehended apart from the foundations of the U.S. settler colonial state in racial slavery and genocide. Turning towards this “position of the unthought” opens up the possibility, not only of grasping systemic violence at its roots, but of recognizing and imagining, celebrating and embracing, forms of insurgent social life which already move beneath, against, and beyond the socio-ecological catastrophe that is the modern world.

Toward an Abolition Ecology

Abolitionist politics continue to evolve in response to the ways racial capitalism exploits, oppresses and commits violence through uneven racial development. As environmental relations have always been part of this, in this short essay, Nik Heynen starts to grapple with what an “abolition ecology” would look like.

Campaign Cover Stories & Fungible Blackness, Part 2

– by Tryon P. Woods –
One of the reasons why the 2016 campaign and selection will be largely inconsequential to abolitionism and black liberation is that antiblackness is entrenched in the very places that present themselves as anti-racist and multicultural: Slave traders who rock the mic in Hamilton and Clinton apologies for mass incarceration.

Campaign Cover Stories & Fungible Blackness, Part 1

– Tryon P. Woods –
The point of considering election season through the abolitionist politic of black studies is not the humdrum one that presidential candidates cannot be taken at their word, but rather that containing black self-determination remains essential to campaign cover stories into the twenty-first century. In 2016, once again, sexual violence and sexual racism hide in plain sight, with blackness the interstitial element.