Anti-Blackness and the Thieving, Gifting, and Owning of Scholarship

Abstract

Recently, it has become a common notion that the revolutionary scholar should have a relationship of theft with the university, which draws from Fred Moten and Stefano Harney and others. This paper challenges this relationship as revolutionary by stating, relationships of theft already exist in the university as seen amongst cheaters, an embodiment that is always already deemed criminal in the university.This article examines theft as it takes place in the politics of plagiarism, and cheating as two case studies that demonstrate that theft itself requires the facilitation of anti-Black property logics. In the examination of both moments, plagiarism and cheating, it is evident that the university subject’s relationship to property and ownership dictates which university subjects can steal and indeed force “mobility, and security” for themselves and their communities, and which university subjects and communities are perpetually stolen from, never fully having ownership over property. Assigning theft as a task only expands the role of the scholar, and by extension the university, both of which only exist to “violently extract” ( Kim, 2017 ) the knowledge and resources that is to be stolen.