Infrastructure and the Form of Politics

2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Darin Barney
Keyword(s):  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Discursive Politics ◽  
Critical Feminist ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Indigenous Thought

Background: This article surveys recent engagement with infrastructure across several fields, with particular attention to analyses of the relationship between infrastructure, extractive capitalism, and settler colonialism.  Analysis: The article treats infrastructure as a form of non-discursive politics and examines the critical status of the concept in light of the historical and contemporary implications of infrastructure in colonialism, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism.  Conclusions and implications: The article concludes that treatments of infrastructure in recent critical feminist, queer, and Indigenous thought open new possibilities for rethinking politics, communication, and media. Contexte : Cet article examine l’engagement récent en matières d’infrastructures dans plusieurs domaines, et accorde une attention particulière aux analyses des relations entre les infrastructures, le capitalisme extractif et le colonialisme-habitant. Analyse : L’article traite l’infrastructure comme une forme de politique non-discursive et examine le statut critique du concept en relation avec des implications historique et contemporaines de l’infrastructure dans le colonialisme, le colonialisme-habitant et le capitalisme racial.  Conclusions et implications : L’article conclut que le traitement de l’infrastructure dans la pensée critique, féministe, queer et indigène récente ouvre de nouvelles possibilités pour repenser la politique, la communication et les médias.

Twenty-Five Years after Sa-I-Gu: Multiracial Politics in Times of Crisis

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff Chang ◽  
Daniel Martinez HoSang ◽  
Soya Jung ◽  
Chandan Reddy ◽  
Alex Tom
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Critical Consciousness ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The State ◽  
Racial Capitalism

We chose to frame this conversation in terms of crisis: not only the state of permanent crisis created by racial capitalism and settler colonialism but also specific flashpoints like Sa-I-Gu [the Korean term for the April 1992 uprising in Los Angeles after the acquittal of the police officers involved in the Rodney King beating]. We want to look at the conditions surrounding these flashpoints and the responses to them that then shaped race consciousness and politics subsequently. Today we have no shortage of crisis, no shortage of flashpoints. And yet there is hope. Perhaps more than at any other time in my lifetime, there are opportunities to shift mass culture, at the very least to popularize and normalize a slightly more critical consciousness. So now I want to turn to my friends here to talk about crisis and multiracial politics. We’ll start with Sa-I-Gu and work forward to this moment and also to future possibilities.

Vagrant Figures

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sal Nicolazzo
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Law And Literature ◽  
Police Force ◽  
Police Legitimacy ◽  
Police Power ◽  
Racial Capitalism

This book, demonstrating the important role of eighteenth-century literary treatments of policing and vagrancy, offers a prehistory of police legitimacy in a period that predates the establishment of the modern police force. The book argues that narrative, textual, and rhetorical practices shaped not only police and legal activity of the period, but also public conceptions of police power. The author's research delves into law and literature on both sides of the Atlantic, tracking the centrality of vagrancy in establishing police power as a form of sovereignty crucial to settler colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism. The first book in several generations to address policing and vagrancy in the eighteenth-century, and the first in the field to center race and empire in its account of literary vagrancy, this work is a significant contribution to the field of eighteenth-century literary and cultural studies.

Money and the Ghetto, Money in the Ghetto

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 494-499
Author(s):  
Destin Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Forms Of Violence ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

This essay revisits Making the Second Ghetto to consider what Arnold Hirsch argued about the relationship between race, money, and the ghetto. It explores how Hirsch’s analysis of this relationship was at once consistent with those penned by other urban historians and distinct from those interested in the political economy of the ghetto. Although moneymaking was hardly the main focus, Hirsch’s engagement with “Vampire” rental agencies and panic peddlers laid the groundwork for an analysis that treats the post–World War II metropolis as a crucial node in the history of racial capitalism. Finally, this essay offers a way to connect local forms of violence to the kinds of constraints imposed by financiers far removed from the city itself.

Desire, Settler Colonialism, and the Racialized Cowboy

2013 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beenash Jafri
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
American Film ◽  
South Asian American ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Do So

In this paper, I argue that settler colonialism is a project of desire, and that attention to desire is particularly useful for understanding the relationship between racialized subjects, whose access to political power in settler regimes is tenuous and uneven. Drawing upon psychoanalytically-inflected theories of race, I examine how this desire is articulated, and look to its effects. To do so, I offer a reading of the 2004 South Asian-American film, Indian Cowboy, reflecting on how racialized subjects negotiate and express the desire to access and be included in settler subjectivity.

scholarly journals “The Atlas of Our Skin and Bone and Blood”: Disability, Ablenationalism, and the War on Drugs

Genealogy ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 62
Author(s):  
Andrea Pitts
Keyword(s):  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Final Section ◽  
War On Drugs ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gloria Anzaldua ◽  
Immigration Reform ◽  
North Central ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Border Zones ◽  
The Relationship

This paper explores the relationship between disability and the aspirational health of the civic body through an analysis of the criminalization of immigration and the war on drugs. In particular, this paper utilizes tools from transnational disability studies to examine the formation and maintenance of a form of ablenationalism operating within immigration reform and drug-related policies. Specifically, the militarization of border zones, as well as the vast austerity measures impacting people across North, Central, and South America have shaped notions of public health, safety, and security according to racial, gendered, and settler logics of futurity. The final section of the paper turns to three authors who have been situated in various ways on the margins of the United States, Gloria Anzaldúa (the Mexico-U.S. border), Aurora Levins Morales (Puerto Rico), and Margo Tamez (Lipan Apache). As such, this article analyzes the liberatory, affective, and future-oriented dimensions of disabled life and experience to chart possibilities for resistance to the converging momentum of carceral settler states, transnational healthcare networks, and racial capitalism.

scholarly journals Legacies of Violence: Examining the Relationship Between Gender and Ethnic Cleansing

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Liz Dolcemore
Keyword(s):  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Effective Means ◽  
Indigenous Women ◽  
Ethnic Cleansing ◽  
Current Crisis ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Critical Gender Studies ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Made In

Traditional examinations of genocidal violence tend to focus on ethnic divisions and often fail to consider the impact of gender with respect to conflict. Building from the work that critical gender studies has made in post-conflict peacebuilding, this paper will look at cases that illustrate how targeting women within specific ethnic groups is an effective means of achieving genocidal goals. It will pay particular attention to the well-known events of the Rwandan genocide and draw comparisons to the legacies of the Indigenous genocide in Canada. Moreover, it will argue that the current crisis of murdered and missing Indigenous women in Canada is related to a project of genocide fuelled by settler colonialism.

scholarly journals The Dialectics of Praxis

2013 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Carpenter ◽  
Genevieve Ritchie ◽  
Shahrzad Mojab
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Immigrant Women ◽  
Community Services ◽  
The State ◽  
The World ◽  
Critical Feminist ◽  
Relations Of Power ◽  
The Relationship

This paper takes up the theorization of the dialectical relationships between consciousness, praxis, and contradiction by drawing primarily on the work of critical feminist and anti-racist scholars Roxana Ng and Paula Allman. Beginning with the important Marxist theorizations of the lives of immigrant women, the state, and community services made by Roxana Ng, we move forward with asserting that Roxana’s commitment to making social relations of power and exploitation ‘knowable’ and ‘transformable’ is based on a complex and revolutionary articulation of the relationship between thinking and being. This dialectical conceptualization of praxis is necessary for any potentially coherent revolutionary feminist anti-racist project. The challenge posed by Roxana is two-fold: not only how best to ‘know’ the world, but how to teach this analysis and generate revolutionary practice.

“The Finest Men We Have Ever Seen”: Jefferson, the Osages, and the Mirror of Nativism

2020 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 276-282
Author(s):  
Robert Warrior
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Us History ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
High Regard ◽  
Ideological Commitment ◽  
Media Event

Abstract Noting the entwined histories of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, Robert Warrior investigates the place of Native Americans in colonial hierarchies manifest across US history, from an 1804 encounter in Washington, DC, between the Osage people and Thomas Jefferson—in which Jefferson claims that the Osage were among “the finest men we have ever seen”—to the January 2019 media event surrounding Nathan Phillips and Nicholas Sandmann on the National Mall. Drawing from the work of Arica Coleman, he notes that Jefferson’s seeming high regard for the Osage people masks his ideological commitment to racial purity, and he casts these reflections alongside movements such as Standing Rock and Black Lives Matter.

scholarly journals “Having Walked Alongside You”: A Conversational Exchange on Territory and Sound in Motion

Intonations ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 24-46
Author(s):  
Tyler Stewart ◽  
Migueltzinta Solis
Keyword(s):  
Academic Writing ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The Other ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Collaborative Project ◽  
Academic Knowledge ◽  
Academic Paper ◽  
Learning Institutions ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Oldman River

As two artist-scholars engaged in research-creation, our goal with this project was to enact a performance/discussion regarding settler-colonialism, sound, performance, and our relationships to land, body and time. During the initial “lockdown phase” of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, we carried out a mediated conversation via WhatsApp voice memos, hiking towards each other along and across the Oldman River, then retracing the other’s path back to our respective points of origin. This collaborative project aims to decolonize the academic paper through a process which combines textual analysis, experiential learning, improvisational performance, and activated writing to ask questions of the relationships between sound, land, and colonial institutions. How does movement through space, and hearing the land, affect our experience of discussing texts? How is discussion informed by, say, the participants being separated (or connected) by a river? What richness exists in oral/aural exchanges that are lost in the textualizing process? What does it mean to move through occupied Blackfoot territory while discussing decolonialism? The structure of this conversational exchange unfolds in loops rather than in the linear standard of academic writing. This “essay” was originally devised as an audiovisual text, but during further revisions, we continued our experimentations with form. The result has taken shape in dual outputs of both sound and text, each form containing affective and sensorial elements not found in the other, creating parallel yet distinct “texts.” While this is an imperfect strategy for those who experience sight/hearing related disabilities, we also recognize that some sensorial experiences are untranslatable into the language of the other senses. We hope that we have encoded each experience of sound and text with enough richness for them to be enjoyed individually, and we invite those who can, to experience how the two forms play off of each other. To this effect, the form of this text focuses on the relationship between the content of our conversation and how it is presented, and between our conversation and the writers, artists and movements we have referenced. We also hope to emphasize our relationality with the land we walked through, the creators of the sounds we listened to, between us, the co-creators of this “text,” as well as the relationship we create with you, the listener/reader experiencing it. As artists/writers/curators, it is a challenge to find alternative textual formats that appropriately reflect artistic research-creation methodologies while also satisfying the demands of academic knowledge dissemination. This collaboration explores the possibility for academic conversations to escape the confines of learning institutions into a space of praxis and embodied experience in motion.

Electric News in Colonial Algeria

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur Asseraf
Keyword(s):  
North Africa ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Multiple Languages ◽  
Two Sides

How do the things which connect us divide us at the same time? This book tells a different history of globalization by tracing how news circulated in a divided society: Algeria under French rule in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The years between 1881 and 1940 were those of maximum colonial power in North Africa, a period of intense technological revolution, global high imperialism, and the expansion of settler colonialism. Algerians became connected to international networks of news, and local people followed distant events with great interest. But once news reached Algeria, accounts of recent events often provoked conflict as they moved between different social groups. In a society split between its native majority and a substantial settler minority, distant wars led to riots. Circulation and polarization were two sides of the same coin. Looking at a range of sources in multiple languages across colonial society, this book offers a new understanding of what news is. News was a whole ecosystem in which new technologies such as the printing press, the telegraph, the cinema and the radio interacted with older media like songs, rumours, letters, and manuscripts. The French government watched anxiously over these developments, monitoring Algerians’ reactions to news through an extensive network of surveillance that often ended up spreading news rather than controlling its flow. By tracking what different people thought was new, this history of news helps us reconsider the relationship between time, media, and historical change.

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