ethicopoliticolit

[ethicopoliticolit]

If the world can turn on Palestinians it can turn on you. The Holocaust taught me that.

#from the river to the sea #palestine #israel #usa #holocaust #genocide #apartheid #israel is a terrorist state #israel is an apartheid state #israel is committing genocide #i stand with palestine #not in my name #history repeats itself

[ethicopoliticolit]

Join me in a three-part mini-seminar on Martin Buber’s I AND THOU, a canonical work of Jewish philosophy published 101 years ago in 1923

Investment: $33 total, payable to my business Venmo (SeanMP-Friends)

Schedule: Sun 7 Apr; Sun 14 Apr; and Sun 21 Apr at 4 PM Pacific / 7 PM Eastern (one hour each time)

Location: online via Google Meet

Note: Access to a shared Google Drive with a copy of the text will be provided upon receipt of funds

#martin buber #i and thou #jewish texts #philosophy #social relations #higher education #critical theory #critical thinking #epochal transition #learning #doing

[ethicopoliticolit]

In this incarnation, she appears in the archive of slavery as a dead girl named in a legal indictment against a slave ship captain tried for the murder of two Negro girls. But we could have as easily encountered her in a ship’s ledger in the tally of debits; or in an overseer’s journal—‘last night I laid with Dido on the ground’; or as an amorous bed-fellow with a purse so elastic ‘that it will contain the largest thing any gentleman can present her with’ in Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies; or as the paramour in the narrative of a mercenary soldier in Surinam; or as a brothel owner in a traveler’s account of the prostitutes of Barbados; or as a minor character in a nineteenth-century pornographic novel. Variously named Harriot, Phibba, Sara, Joanna, Rachel, Linda, and Sally, she is found everywhere in the Atlantic world. The barracoon, the hollow of the slave ship, the pest-house, the brothel, the cage, the surgeon’s laboratory, the prison, the cane-field, the kitchen, the master’s bedroom—turn out to be exactly the same place and in all of them she is called Venus.

—Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts” (2008)

#saidiya hartman #say her name #radical black studies #black feminist theory #Venus #gender and slavery #cultural studies #israel #palestine #higher education #afterlives #in the wake

[ethicopoliticolit]

No time like the present to let it rip, sí?

#free palestine #ceasefire now #make love not war #silence = death #no time like the present #black comedy #gallows humor #performance art #speak out #not in my name #never forget #fuck netanyahu #fuck biden #Youtube

[ethicopoliticolit]

California, 1864, or Israel, 2024?

#cultural studies #israel #palestine #settler colonialism #colonial studies #higher education #world news #world history

[ethicopoliticolit]

Just learned that Claudine Gay was forced to resign at Harvard after initially weathering the backlash to her Congressional testimony last month. I’m stunned, because I thought if any institution in this country I call the Union States of America could withstand the new McCarthyism masquerading as anti-anti-Semitism, it’d be Harvard. (And please note I’m inaugurating a new era for this Tumblr, making my own statements after collecting all the others—that is, others’.)

And while it’s highly ironic that a Black woman such as Gay should be charged with “inadequate citation,” it’s also unfortunate that she apparently did indeed omit some quotation marks in her early work. I’m no Gay, of course, but that’s why I was fanatical about zero-error attribution in my own scholarship and teaching. I guess this is because I was a journalist prior to entering academia, and specifically a factchecker at the beginning of my editorial career; I knew writers and publications could get sued for such mistakes (and were).

Anyway, speaking about lawsuits: the recent DEI SCOTUS case that Harvard had a role in was also at play here, per Nia T. Evans at Mother Jones.

#harvard #antisemitism #claudine gay #israel #palestine #higher education #diversity #cultural studies #citation #right wing politics #right wing media #black women #misogynoir

[ethicopoliticolit]

Steal This Book is, in a way, a manual of survival in the prison that is Amerika. It preaches jailbreak….It implies that the reader is “ideologically set,” in that he understands corporate feudalism as the only robbery worthy of being called “crime,” for it is committed against the people as a whole. Whether the ways it describes to rip-off shit are legal or illegal is irrelevant. The dictionary of law is written by the bosses of order. Our moral dictionary says no heisting from each other. To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral.

—Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book (1971)

#abbie hoffman #steal this book #rule of law #democracy #protest #1960s #flower power

[ethicopoliticolit]

There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks and perceive differently than one sees is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all. [Para.] People will say, perhaps, that these games with oneself need only go on behind the scenes; that they are, at best, part of those labors of preparation that efface themselves when they have had their effects. But what, then, is philosophy today—philosophical activity, I mean—if not the critical labor of thought upon itself? And if it does not consist, in place of legitimating what one already knows, in undertaking to know how, and up to what limit, it would be possible to think differently?

—Michel Foucault, quoted in James Miller’s The Passion of Michel Foucault (1993)

#michel foucault #history of sexuality #cultural studies #philosophy #limit experiences #personal change #social change #reflection

[ethicopoliticolit]

Tomorrow, I thought for the hundredth time, I shall kill a man, and I wondered if the crying child and the woman across the way knew. [Para.] I did not know the man. To my eyes he had no face; he did not even exist, for I knew nothing about him. I did not know whether he scratched his nose when he ate, whether he talked or kept quiet when he was making love, whether he gloried in his hate, whether he betrayed his wife or his God or his own future. All I knew was that he was an Englishman and my enemy. The two terms were synonymous.

—Elie Wiesel, Dawn (1961)

#uk #us #israel #palestine #elie wiesel #dawn #abraham accords #make love not war

[ethicopoliticolit]

Almost all the media coverage of AIDS has been aimed at the heterosexual groups now minimally at risk, as if the high-risk groups were not part of the audience. And in a sense, as Watney suggests, they’re not. The media targets “an imaginary national family unit which is both white and heterosexual” (p. 43). This doesn’t mean that most TV viewers in Europe and America are *not* white and heterosexual and part of a family. It does, however, mean, as Stuart Hall argues, that representation is very different from reflection: “It implies the active work of selecting and presenting, of structuring and shaping: not merely the transmitting of already-existing meaning, but the more active labour of *making things mean*” (quoted p. 124). TV doesn't make the family, but it makes the family *mean* in a certain way. That is, it makes an exceptionally sharp distinction between the family as a biological unit and as a cultural identity, and it does this by teaching us the attributes and attitudes by which people who thought they were already in a family actually only *begin to qualify* as belonging to a family. The great power of the media, and especially of television, is, as Watney writes, “its capacity to manufacture subjectivity itself” (p. 125), and in so doing to dictate the shape of an identity. The “general public” is at once an ideological construct and a moral prescription. Furthermore, the definition of the family *as an identity* is, inherently, an exclusionary process, and the cultural product has no obligation whatsoever to coincide exactly with its natural referent. Thus the family identity produced on American television is much more likely to include your dog than your homosexual brother or sister.

—Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987)

#queer theory #queer studies #HIV/AIDS #1980s #reaganism #leo bersani #stuart hall #cultural studies #critical theory #intellectual history

[ethicopoliticolit]

Dwelling too long on problems of rabbinic self-definition or the issue of originality in traditional literature may be missing the point, however. The question is less to determine if the rabbis thought they were doing something ‘new’ when they wrote the classic texts, than to consider what this enterprise is all about on its own terms. [Para.] Let us consider, then, the issue of the relationship of Torah to the vast body of literature that attempts to comment upon, elucidate or explain the Torah—that is, the great traditional texts of postbiblical history. Or, to use the language of the tradition, let us ask: what is the connection between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah? In place of the modern issue of originality I would suggest that the Oral Torah had a different goal: namely a special kind of interaction.

—Barry W. Holtz, “Introduction: On Reading Jewish Texts,” Back to the Sources: Reading the Classic Jewish Texts (Summit Books, 1984)

#jewish tradition #jewish texts #textual tradition #reading #reading practices #originality

[ethicopoliticolit]

Part II

Implicit in this epistemological framework are the worldviews of those who have been cast as non-Human or less-than-Human: Frantz Fanon's les damnés, imperial constructs who can only be understood as the difference outside. Les damnés are the anthropos in relation to humanitas as humanitas is defined by those who conceive of themselves as Human. Here, clearly, imperial epistemologies emerge alongside the widespread coloniality of knowledge: Christian theology, secular philosophy, and sciences that were formed and shaped under European geographic monarchies and nation-states (which also provided the unification of Western knowledge systems in six modern/imperial languages grounded in Greek and Latin). This is the belief system that Wynter's work unveils: the naturalization of and thus a steadfast belief in modes of thinking—the principles and rules of knowing—that calcify a commitment to an epistemological tract that profits from replicating itself. By unveiling this system, she draws attention to the conditions through which the epistemologies of les damnés are made. The epistemologies of les damnés do not seek to arrive at a perfect or true definition of the Human, for there is no Human 'out there' beyond the Western imperial concept of Man/Human from the Renaissance on.

#sylvia wynter #walter mignolo #katherine mckittrick #humanity #humanities #humanitas #unlearning #renarrating

[ethicopoliticolit]

Part I

The decolonial option does not simply protest the contents of imperial coloniality; it demands a delinking of oneself from the knowledge systems we take for granted (and can profit from) and practicing epistemic disobedience. [Para.] Wynter's decolonial project calls into question the concept of the Human and its epistemological underpinnings. Her work draws on the research of Chilean scientist, philosopher, and intellectual Humberto Maturana (in collaboration in an early stage with Francisco Varela) and black and Caribbean intellectuals and social theorists. Wynter draws on Maturana's insights, in particular his work on autopoiesis, which uncovers the interconnectedness of 'seeing' the world and 'knowing' the world: specifically, he shows that what is seen with the eyes does not represent the world outside the living organism; rather, it is the living organism that fabricates an image of the world through the internal/neurological processing of information. Thus, Maturana made the connection between the ways in which human beings construct their world and their criteria of truth and objectivity and noticed how their/our nervous system processes and responds to information. [Para.] It is across both neurobiological cognition and decolonial practices that Sylvia Wynter's work and her intellectual disobedience emerge. Wynter suggests that if we accept that epistemology gives us the principles and rules of knowing through which the Human and Humanity are understood, we are trapped in a knowledge system that fails to notice that the stories of what it means to be Human—specifically origin stories that explain who/what we are—are, in fact, narratively constructed. Wynter's commentaries on Man1, Man2, and the making of the Human should thus be understood alongside historical and epistemological epochs (medieval, classical) that present humanness through intelligible cosmogonies that, as Denise da Silva argues in this collection, require a juridical-economic colonial presence. To study 'Man' or 'Humanity' is therefore to study a narrativization that has been produced with the very instruments (or categories) that we study with. In short, it is precisely the practice of accepting the principles and rules of knowing that produces narratives that naturalize, for example, evolution and dysselection and thus biocentric Human origin stories. It follows that we fail to notice that evolution, dysselection, and biocentricity are origin stories with an ontological effect. Put simply: we tend to believe our cosmogonies as natural truth(s); this belief system is calcified by our commitment to his belief system; the schema self-replicates, as we continually invest in its systemic belief qualities. In this way, Wynter's writings on the Human and who/what we are are reflective of Maturana's autopoietics. [Para.] Wynter refuses to embrace the entity of the Human independently of the epistemic categories and concepts that created it by suggesting instead that our conceptualizations of the Human are produced within an autopoietic system. The problem of the Human is thus not identity-based per se but in the enunciations of what it means to be Human—enunciations that are concocted and circulated by those who most convincingly (and powerfully) imagine the 'right' or 'noble' or 'moral' characteristics of Human and in this project their own image-experience of the Human into the sphere of Universal Humanness. The Human is therefore the product of a particular epistemology, yet it appears to be (and is accepted as) a naturally independent entity existing in the world.

Walter Mignolo, "Sylvia Wynter: What Does It Mean to Be Human?" In Sylvia Wynter, ed. Katherine McKittrick, Duke, 2015 (emphasis his)

#sylvia wynter #walter mignolo #katherine mckittrick #humanity #humanities #humanitas #unlearning #renarrating

[ethicopoliticolit]

The task that awaits all of us, then, is to speak desire plainly, to pay attention to what we think when we fuck. It is the particular task of white men to give up the comforts of naivete, of banal gestures to racial inclusion. The work before us is precisely to put our own bodies on the line. We must refuse to allow the production of a queer theory so reified that it does nothing to challenge the way we interact, the way we think, and the way we fuck. We must insist on a queer theory that takes the queer body and what we do with it as a primary focus, lest we allow for the articulation of a queer subjectivity that never recognizes the differences we create and carry in our bodies, including not only race but gender, health, and age, to name only the most obvious categories. We must not only think as we fuck but also pay close attention to all the implications, good and bad, of those sometimes startling thoughts.

Robert Reid-Pharr, "Dinge," Black Gay Man, NYU, 2001

#queer-of-color critique #queer theory #queer desire #queer studies #political theory #political economy

[ethicopoliticolit]

A job in a factory is an awful lot like working on a plantation in the South. The bosses see all the workers like they're children, and everyone knows how lazy children are. So Benny thought he'd teach me a little something about responsibility because he was the boss and I was the child. [Para.] The white workers didn't have a problem with that kind of treatment because they didn't come from a place where men were always called boys. The white worker would have just said, "Sure, Benny, you called it right, but damn if I can see straight right now." And Benny would have understood that. He would have laughed and realized how pushy he was being and offered to take Mr. Davenport, or whoever, out to drink a beer. But the Negro workers didn't drink with Benny. We didn't go to the same bars, we didn't wink at the same girls. [Para.] What I should have done, if I wanted my job, was to stay, like he asked, and then come back early the next day to recheck the work. If I had told Benny I couldn't see straight he would have told me to buy glasses.

Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress, chapter nine. (NB: Thinking about the repeating "straight.")

#walter mosley #african american literature #jewish american literature #los angeles

[ethicopoliticolit]

André Bazin's ontology of the photographic image has long stood as a key text in a realist theory of cinema. At its limit this theory states that photography and cinema are not icons that resemble or represent the world; rather, through indexical registrations of objects from the world onto photographic emulsions, they re-present, and hence are, this world. As any student of contemporary film theory knows, however, Bazin's ontology of cinema is but one pole of a dialectic, the other half of which states, as Bazin does at the end of this same essay, 'Cinema is also a language.' But in popular consciousness it is the first part of Bazin's 'ontology of the photographic image' that counts, especially when thinking about hard-core film or video pornography. It is not surprising, then, to find the Meese Commission quoting the above passage from Bazin in its efforts to detail the special dangers of pornography. To the commission, the filmic representation of an 'actual person' engaged in sexual acts is exactly the same as if witnessed 'in the flesh.' Thus, the reasoning goes, film audiences bear 'direct' witness to any violence or perversion therein enacted.

Linda Williams, "Power, Pleasure, and Perversion: Sadomasochistic Film Pornography," Representations (1989)

#film #film theory #photography #cultural studies #culture wars

[ethicopoliticolit]

Black women have organized before to oppose racist violence. In the nineteenth century the Black Women's Club Movement was born largely in response to the epidemic of lynching during that era. Leaders like Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell recognized that Black women could not move toward empowerment if they did not radically challenge the reign of lynch law in the land. Today, Afro-American women must actively take the lead in the movement against racist violence, as did our sister-ancestors almost a century ago. We must lift as we climb. As our ancestors organized for the passage of a federal antilynch law—and indeed involved themselves in the woman suffrage movement for the purpose of securing that legislation—we must today become activists in the effort to secure legislation declaring racism and anti-Semitism as crimes. Extensively as some instances of racist violence may be publicized at this time, many more racist-inspired crimes go unnoticed as a consequence of the failure of law enforcement to specifically classify them as such. A person scrawling swastikas or 'KKK' on an apartment building may simply be charged—if criminal charges are brought at all—with defacing property or malicious mischief. Recently, a Ku Klux Klanner who burned a cross in front of a Black family's home was charged with 'burning without a permit.' We need federal and local laws against acts of racist and anti-Semitic violence. We must organize, lobby, march, and demonstrate in order to guarantee their passage.

Angela Davis, “Let Us All Rise Together: Perspectives on Empowerment for Afro-American Women,” in Women, Culture, & Politics (Random House, 1989), 10-11.

#shabbat with angela davis #angela davis #prophet angela #i stand with ilhan omar #white supremacy #black women #brown women #anti-racism #anti-anti-semitism #crimes against humanity #intersectionality