Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
Reading the Riots: ‘It was a war, and we had the police scared’
Rioters speak for the first time about why they took part in the summer 2011 disturbances, the most serious bout of civil unrest in Britain in a generation. Paul Lewis presents the findings of a Guardian and London School of Economics study that reveals how the riots were sparked by poverty, injustice and a visceral hatred of the police
This is a must watch.
Indeed.
“I wasn’t there for the robbing; I was there for revenge.”
Why does every slightly courageous or antagonistic gesture that comes from the occupy movement have to be immediately accompanied by aggressive stipulations of privilege and racial/sexual normativity? Clearly no one should be attacked by cops. I just can’t stand how this movement’s constant appeals to its own innocence and righteousness seem to simultaneously insist on reinscribing others as appropriate objects of state violence.
“Stop beating students”? Why not, “stop beating (everyone / anyone)” ? Why not, “stop existing,” full stop?
(h/t hungryghoast for the youtube)
There is a voraciously instrumental anti-essentialism, powered in an intense and terrible way by good intentions, that is the intellectual platform from which black studies’ disavowal of its object and aim is launched, even when that disavowal comes in something which also thinks itself to be moving in the direction of that object and aim. I’m trying to move by way of a kind of resistance to that anti-essentialism, one that requires a paleonymic relation to blackness; I’m trying to own a certain dispossession, the underprivilege of being-sentenced to this gift of constantly escaping and to standing in for the fugitivity (to echo Natahaniel Mackey, Daphne Brooks and Michel Foucault) (of the imagination) that is an irreducible property of life, persisting in and against every disciplinary technique while constituting and instantiating not just the thought but that actuality of the outside that is what/where blackness is—as space or spacing of the imagination, as condition of possibility and constant troubling of critique.
CRITICAL ETHNIC STUDIES II:
Settler Colonialism/Heteropatriarchy/White Supremacy
Social Transformation and the Academic Industrial Complex
Another Major Conference! (Yes)
To Be Held at the
University of Illinois-Chicago,
September 19-21, 2013 (not 2012)
Confirmed speakers (more to come!)
- Taiaiake Alfred, University of Victoria
- Robin D.G. Kelley, University of Southern California
- Vijay Prashad, Trinity College
- Jasbir Puar, Rutgers University
- Cedric Robinson, UC Santa Barbar
- Patrick Wolfe, La Trobe University
- Jessica Yee, Native Youth Sexual Health Network
Call for Papers will follow in January 2012
Jared Sexton: People-of-Color-Blindness
Jared Sexton, Associate Professor and Director of the Program in African American Studies at UC Irvine, will discuss the concept of “people of color,” highlighting a form of blindness to the singularity of racial slavery internal to its articulation. The first section of the talk charts briefly a theoretical itinerary that reads the radical black feminism of Saidiya Hartman and Hortense Spillers and the political ontology of Frank B. Wilderson against the prevarication regarding slavery and its afterlife in prominent strains of critical theory. The second section attempts to situate Wilderson’s formulation of “afro-pessimism” with respect to the “black optimism” articulated by Fred Moten and other theorists of black performance.
People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes On the Afterlife of Slavery (.pdf)
(via abolitionista)
Nina Simone - Revolution. Harlem Cultural Festival, 1969.
Amazing! Check this NPR piece from 2009 too:
Any Tumblr pals coming into Baltimore for this year’s ASA? Please come check out this panel organized by folks from the local activist community. And if you can, kick in a few bucks to help local prison abolition efforts:
A panel discussion at the 2640 space (2640 St. Paul), featuring:
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Andrea Smith
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Lisa Nakamura
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Ruth Gilmore
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Fred Moten
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Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
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David Roediger
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Dylan Rodríguez
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Scott Kurashige
Organized by Red Emma’s and Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle.
[W]hile we mourn his death and all of the things it raises for us―racism, the death penalty, the prison industrial complex, police brutality, the historic trauma of lynchings, etc., I want us to move beyond discourses of innocence, for while it may make us feel more righteous in our defense of Troy Davis, and the many like him who have been executed or who currently languish inside prison walls, we must come to accept that to be Black and “innocent” is an oxymoron in the world we live in.
…
Even the Left in the US engages in other forms of innocence frames outside of prison reform contexts, that still reference and reduce Blacks to criminality. Often the anti-war, or anti-globalization movements, including the current mobilizations on Wall Street explain acts of police violence or arrests as “just for exercising our right to protest.” These statements are an exercise in bad faith―they suggest that the police have some legitimate reasons for arrests, or that white bodies simply protesting the seat of American capital are innocents, not criminal. What would it mean to embrace criminality, as opposed to trying to rhetorically avoid it by notions of innocence or exercising “rights?”
