Social TextPub Date : 2021-06-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-8903620
S. Franklin
{"title":"Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value","authors":"S. Franklin","doi":"10.1215/01642472-8903620","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-8903620","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article takes the presentation of mechanical and informatic models in Samuel Delany's Neveryóna as an occasion to examine the relations of force, abstraction, information, and differential valuation that constitute racial capitalism. In order to do this, the article considers the continuities and divergences between the principles those models demonstrate, the lessons on value and economic determination that precede them, and Delany's subsequent presentation of surplus populations, intricated “free” and slave labor, and the modes of racialized differentiation that shape and are shaped in the interstices of those social formations. In Delany's sword-and-sorcery bildungsroman, the models illustrate the abstract logic of value, show that logic to be informatic in character, and point toward a dialectical relationship between this informatic logic and the concrete practices of dispossession that produce and operate through ascriptive race and gender regimes. Value's abstract operations are too often understood to be incommensurable with such regimes, yet Delany's presentation deploys the language and processes associated with informatics to reveal an essential relationship between the abstract network that results from value's mediating function and the modes of ascription and concrete violence that, as a result of such mediation, tend to be associated with precapitalist or noncapitalist social formations.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":"39 1","pages":"69-91"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49009276","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social TextPub Date : 2021-06-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-8903577
W. Sung
{"title":"In the Wake of Visual Failure","authors":"W. Sung","doi":"10.1215/01642472-8903577","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-8903577","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article examines the role of the visual in instances of recorded anti-Black racial violence and pushes against dominant discourses of the technological rescue narrative—that technology and more visibility will lead to different outcomes of accountability, protection, and safety. Instead, this article argues that the tightly bound association of anti-Black racial violence's recognizability to the visual has created a dynamic that simultaneously moves us closer to and further away from its ontological truths. Examining Twitter as a multisensorial platform and its users’ imaginative engagements with the #IfIDieInPoliceCustody hashtag memorializing Sandra Bland's death, the author identifies that users craft an anticipatory nonspectatorship, a mode of imaginative witnessing arising from the contexts of technological and visual failure and the situated imaginations of Black epistemologies. These users register a deep suspicion of the evidentiary and refuse the spectacular of racial violence's visual form, instead highlighting its ubiquitous and quotidian nature by asserting themselves into their own scenes of visual failure and becoming witnesses to their own imagined deaths. Finally, in identifying the visual failures surrounding Sandra Bland's jail cell, the author illuminates how the ontology of the glitch can demonstrate the mechanics of white supremacy's operations.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":"39 1","pages":"1-23"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49036281","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social TextPub Date : 2021-06-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-8903606
Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo
{"title":"Broken Automatons and Barbed Ecologies in Ligia Lewis's Choreographic Imaginary","authors":"Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo","doi":"10.1215/01642472-8903606","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-8903606","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article considers choreographer Ligia Lewis's hour-long ensemble performance Water Will (in Melody) to theorize on the relationship between ecological fugitivity and black fugitive movement. It explores how Lewis's choreography disrupts the colonial space-times of colonialism and slavery by offering portals into other space-times. In Water Will (in Melody), racialized assemblages break down from overuse and from glaring surveillance in the form of illumination. The last few minutes of the piece evoke an ambivalent postapocalyptic space-time where darkness becomes textured with what seems to be moonlight peeking into a wet cave. This ending evokes the ecological of histories of fugitivity and the earthiness of Édouard Glissant's concept of opacity, both frequently overlooked in discussions of black fugitivity. The final section traces Lewis's fugitive choreography into what the article calls the barbed ecologies of the hills of the Dominican Republic and Haiti, sites of black and indigenous marronage and symbiosis.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":"39 1","pages":"51-67"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44945866","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social TextPub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-8750076
Theresa Stewart-Ambo, K. Yang
{"title":"Beyond Land Acknowledgment in Settler Institutions","authors":"Theresa Stewart-Ambo, K. Yang","doi":"10.1215/01642472-8750076","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-8750076","url":null,"abstract":"What does land acknowledgment do? Where does it come from? Where is it pointing? Existing literature, especially critiques by Indigenous scholars, unequivocally assert that settler land acknowledgments are problematic in their favoring of rhetoric over action. However, formal written statements may challenge institutions to recognize their complicity in settler colonialism and their institutional responsibilities to tribal sovereignty. Building on these critiques, particularly the writings of Métis cultural producer Chelsea Vowel, this article offers beyond as a framework for how institutional land acknowledgments can or cannot support Indigenous relationality, land pedagogy, and accountability to place and peoples. The authors describe the critical differences between Indigenous protocols of mutual recognition and settler practices of land acknowledgment. These Indigenous/settler differences illuminate an Indigenous perspective on what acknowledgments ought to accomplish. For example, Acjachemen/Tongva scholar Charles Sepulveda forwards the Tongva concept of Kuuyam, or guest, as “a reimagining of human relationships to place outside of the structures of settler colonialism.” What would it mean for a settler speaker of a land acknowledgment to say, “I am a visitor, and I hope to become a proper guest”? Two empirical examples are presented: the University of California, Los Angeles, where an acknowledgment was crafted in 2018; and the University of California, San Diego, where an acknowledgment is under way in 2020. The article concludes with beyond as a potential decolonial framework for land acknowledgment that recognizes Indigenous futures.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":"39 1","pages":"21-46"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48068693","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social TextPub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-8750112
D. A. Maldonado, E. Meiners
{"title":"Due Time","authors":"D. A. Maldonado, E. Meiners","doi":"10.1215/01642472-8750112","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-8750112","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 At this political moment within the university, mass incarceration and its most recognizable constituents, the prisoner and the prison, are at a predictable tipping point: the violence of inclusion. Neoliberal multiculturalism appears capacious enough to hold select representations of mass incarceration in its pursuit of new markets and deft enough to deploy this difference to whitewash other forms of institutional violence. Building from a long genealogy of scholarship and organizing that maps the coconstitutiveness of the university with our prison-industrial complex, this essay makes visible emergent lines and arrangements of power and resistance that inhibit and build abolition.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":"39 1","pages":"69-92"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45325220","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social TextPub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-8750124
Jaime Acosta Gonzalez, E. Meyerhoff
{"title":"Stained University","authors":"Jaime Acosta Gonzalez, E. Meyerhoff","doi":"10.1215/01642472-8750124","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-8750124","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Duke University was founded on tobacco wealth, and now it has a tobacco-free campus. How should we understand this change? How can communities around this university, and higher education broadly, reckon with our historical and ongoing complicities with tobacco capitalism? This article examines how the individualized subject has been historically constructed, in response to resistances, through supplementary relations between the university and tobacco industries. With abolitionist university studies, the authors focus on the postslavery university as a key site for these individualizing processes. They situate Duke as a nexus of new means of capitalist accumulation, including, on the one hand, the postslavery university as an institution for disciplining, individualizing, and differentiating wage laborers and, on the other, the tobacco industry's shift to monopolization and mass consumption of tobacco commodities. The long Black freedom movement continues in the post-WWII era with resistances that push capitalism into crisis, while simultaneously, capitalism's coping mechanism of tobacco use has the unintended consequence of mass death. This article explores how, at the site of Duke, part of capitalism's response to resistance movements has been to deepen the individualization processes, charging individuals with taking on responsibility for the costs of both tobacco use and higher education. The authors ask how narratives of smoke-free and tobacco-free campuses could interlink with postracial narratives to obscure how the tobacco companies and universities have accumulated capital through racism, deception, dispossession, and exploitation.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":"39 1","pages":"93-123"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42871321","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social TextPub Date : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-8680438
Christina B. Hanhardt, J. Puar, Neel Ahuja, Paul Amar, Aniruddha Dutta, Fatima El‐Tayeb, Kwame A. Holmes, S. Seikaly
{"title":"Beyond Trigger Warnings","authors":"Christina B. Hanhardt, J. Puar, Neel Ahuja, Paul Amar, Aniruddha Dutta, Fatima El‐Tayeb, Kwame A. Holmes, S. Seikaly","doi":"10.1215/01642472-8680438","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-8680438","url":null,"abstract":"This roundtable asks what queer studies might offer to an analysis of debates on campus safety. New approaches in queer studies take as their object of study not only sex and gender but also the cultural politics of liberalism; in turn, scholarship on the geopolitics of injury demonstrates the situatedness of both identity and economic forms. Brought together, these scholarly approaches provide an important lens on many of the contradictions of contemporary college campuses. Rendering classrooms and other places on campus as intrinsically embedded in global relations of militarization, securitization, dispossession, and risk management, “safe space” is elaborated in this roundtable in material, administrative, and pragmatic terms: from the conceptualization of alert systems to the racialized fears driving insurance calculations for international study programs to the struggles over academic freedom and student organizing.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":"38 1","pages":"49-76"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43493918","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social TextPub Date : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-8680478
Aren Z. Aizura, Marquis Bey, T. Beauchamp, Treva Ellison, Jules Gill-Peterson, Eliza Steinbock
{"title":"Thinking with Trans Now","authors":"Aren Z. Aizura, Marquis Bey, T. Beauchamp, Treva Ellison, Jules Gill-Peterson, Eliza Steinbock","doi":"10.1215/01642472-8680478","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-8680478","url":null,"abstract":"This roundtable considers trans theory’s status as a site of thinking racialization, empire, political economy, and materiality in the current historical, institutional, and political moment. We ask, what does it mean to think trans in a time of crisis?, and what is the place of critique in a crisis?, acknowledging that global crises are not insulated from trans, and trans is not insulated from the world. This roundtable looks to materialist formations to think trans now, including a new materialism premised on thinking about trans embodiment outside of trans as subject position, the materialism of objects and commodities, and a historical materialism shaped by queer of color critique.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46834921","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social TextPub Date : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-8680426
Petrus Liu
{"title":"Queer Theory and the Specter of Materialism","authors":"Petrus Liu","doi":"10.1215/01642472-8680426","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-8680426","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that the development of queer theory as a field has been critically shaped by a desire to dissociate the studies of gender and sexuality from material concerns. Though what is meant by “the material” varies wildly from context to context, queer critiques of materialism have produced an entrenched impression of the incommensurability between queer theory and Marxism. Tracing the varied ways in which the notion of the material has been deployed by queer critics to pose questions about the economic reductionism of Marxism, empiricism, and corporeality, this article demonstrates that the material has functioned as a kind of spectral presence in queer theorizing, an enabling form of haunting that keeps critics worrying productively about the best way to stay true to the radically anticipatory orientation of early queer theory. The specter of the material provides the epistemological foundation for canonical texts in queer theory that do not appear to be concerned with Marxism, such as those of Butler and Sedgwick; it also serves as the conceptual fulcrum for a number of “queer Marxist” projects that attempt to synthesize these two traditions. This article concludes by suggesting that, instead of viewing queer theory and Marxism as intellectually incompatible or historically successive projects, we might productively reconceptualize them as subjectless critiques commonly concerned with the problem of social structuration.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":"38 1","pages":"25-47"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48696897","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social TextPub Date : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-8680466
Jodi A. Byrd
{"title":"What’s Normative Got to Do with It?","authors":"Jodi A. Byrd","doi":"10.1215/01642472-8680466","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-8680466","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers the queer problem of Indigenous studies that exists in the disjunctures and disconnections that emerge when queer studies, Indigenous studies, and Indigenous feminisms are brought into conversation. Reflecting on what the material and grounded body of indigeneity could mean in the context of settler colonialism, where Indigenous women and queers are disappeared into nowhere, and in light of Indigenous insistence on land as normative, where Indigenous bodies reemerge as first and foremost political orders, this article offers queer Indigenous relationality as an additive to Indigenous feminisms. What if, this article asks, queer indigeneity were centered as an analytic method that refuses normativity even as it imagines, through relationality, a possibility for the materiality of decolonization?","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49255372","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}