The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission, which reported in the last days of the Trump Administration in the US, is a direct retort to the New York Times 1619 Project. In contrast to the 1619 Project which centred on slavery and its role in shaping the US, the Commission were tasked with ‘summarising the principles of…
I’ve written about The Punitive Society course by Foucault before, particularly in a review essay which appeared in Historical Materialism, and then in my book Foucault: The Birth of Power which appeared with Polity in 2017. That was a book based on both textual and archival research, an attempt to trace how Foucault moved from The Archaeology of Knowledge in 1969 to Surveiller…
The Trump presidency has been a rocky road for pretty much everyone to the left of Trump himself. Nonetheless, the lethal efforts of the President’s supporters, at his command, to storm the Capitol and overturn 2020’s supposedly ‘fraudulent’ result by force, seems to have been the final straw. Many of the Trump machine’s most loyal…
This text was presented in a seminar on ‘Beyond the Punitive Society’ on 7th January 2021, as part of the seminar series ‘Abolition Democracy 13/13’, co-hosted by the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought at Columbia University and the Centre for Research in Post-Kantian European Philosophy at the University of Warwick. My reflections here will…
Cathy Park Hong is a poet of South Korean descent, raised and living in the US. In 2020 she published her book of creative non-fiction, “Minor Feelings: A Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition”. She calls minor feelings: “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments…
A human body, at any given moment, might be inhabited by over 380 trillion viruses, traversing internal and external bodily surfaces. This community, known as the human virome, forms part of a holobiont – a term used to describe the obligatory symbiosis of an organism.[1] The human body is one such organism, which does not form a…
The many riots and anti-police demonstrations this year have led to long-fought movements for prison and police abolition being brought into mainstream media and policy – with calls to defund police and divert money towards community support issuing from across the western political left. But in this same moment we have also witnessed calls for…
Welcome to the online book launch seminar of Constituent Power: Law, Popular Rule and Politics (EUP 2020), co-edited by Matilda Arvidsson (Gothenburg), Leila Brännström (Lund) and Panu Minkkinen (Helsinki). Recent social and political developments, including the presidential elections in the United States, antidemocratic state policies in Hungary and Poland, and the political climate in the rest of Europe have brought…
Steve Biko, I Write What I Like (A Stubbs. ed) (Heinemann 1978) Although she was writing about the black existentialist novelist Ralph Ellison, Hortense Spillers could easily have also been referring to Stephen Bantu Biko when she invokes the figure of a Black thinker who revises “’blackness’ into a critical posture” – “a strategy [and] process of culture critique” – and harnesses…
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (The New Press 2010) When I was a wandering recent law graduate, I found myself washed up in the murky bayous of New Orleans, working at an under-resourced, over-stressed Capital defence law firm. After a few weeks of preparing case work at my desk, I make my first trip to speak…
Gloria Anzaldúa, ‘The Coming of el Mundo Surdo’ in AnaLouise Keating (ed), The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader (Duke 2009) How can we make sense of a global order that is founded upon the act of making “most of the world”[1] out of place, through the motions of the global economy and those divisions from which it has always fed…
Lewis Gordon, Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (Routledge 2007) I’ve been called ‘Paki’, ‘flaco n*****’, ‘Ethiopian’ or ‘too Latin American’ more times than I care to count. Including during and about my teaching. But CRT is not about who I am or what names I’ve been called. It isn’t about self-victimhood or identity-politics. It’s about agency,…
Kimberlé Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics.’ University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989) 139; Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights. (Harvard 1991). Sometimes our language fails us. We observe things in daily life—about our social interactions, our institutions, or the ways that laws…
Donna Awatere, Māori Sovereignty (Broadsheet 1984) My mother’s people are from Ōpōtiki on the East Cape of Aotearoa and it wasn’t until I was an adult that I came to have some understanding of my Māoritanga, or our people’s history. Our iwi (tribe) Whakatōhea are widely acknowledged to have been among those ravaged the worst by successive…
James Baldwin, Speech at Berkeley (1979) I call myself a child of this world of empire. The colony I was born in bore recent witness to British district officers who met with one of my grandfathers. My other grandfather was schooled by Scottish missionaries. Colonial anthropologists and sociologists took intrusive photographs of the women of my family.…
Attia Hosain, Sunlight on a Broken Column (Chatto and Windus 1961) A few years ago, I was offered the opportunity to participate in a workshop in India to support early career academics with their writing. The workshop was geared towards addressing the countless issues with academic publishing and the ways knowledge production in the “Global South” is…
As if this annus horribilis wasn’t horribilis enough in the last few weeks the Conservative government, the depth of whose depravity is impossible to fathom from one day to the next, have commenced a McCarthy-esque censorship initiative that would be comical if it wasn’t a widely recognised harbinger of fascism. These brow-beating heroes of ‘free speech’ dissatisfied only with…
This call for papers is for an interdisciplinary virtual seminar exploring interpretations, intersections, and tensions between the law of equity and new technologies. Drawing on work by the likes of Franco Berardi, Ian Bogost, Adam Greenfield, and Bernard Stiegler, we welcome speculative theories, critical fields of thought, and futurological perspectives. We also welcome contributions from…
Today Petr Kupka and Vaclaw Walach continue the interview with Mark Neocleous and Alex Vitale, discussing their critical analyses of policing. VW&PK: On the other hand, there are cases that appear to show that policing is not just about working-class people and ethnic minorities. Bernie Madoff was punished for his financial machinations for example. Did…
On 14 July Petr Kupka and I sat down (virtually) with Mark Neocleous and Alex Vitale to discuss their critical analyses of policing. Vitale is a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and has been frequently interviewed on the issue of policing in connection with the Black Lives Matter protest movement. His latest book The End…