Ep. 71 – Jedidiah Purdy, After Nature

In this episode, Emily and John welcome John’s colleague Gary Kroll for a discussion of Jedediah Purdy‘s After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. We map the contours of the book, asking questions about the scope of the argument and both the promises and limits of its framework. Throughout we interrogate the concepts of the Anthropocene, humanism, the posthuman (are they incompatible??), and democracy, and ask what work the environmental imaginary does. In classic Always Already fashion, notions of scientific authority appear along with our favorite questions: what of capitalism, and wherefore art the feminist lens? And, how would an engagement with Indigenous cosmologies and politics transform Purdy’s own environmental imagination? Tune in to help us welcome our first guest holding the very official title Mother of Dragons! 

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes or Spotify. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.

Links:

• Purdy talk about After Nature at Duke in 2015
• “The New Nature” forum at Boston Review
• Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock
• Kyle Whyte, “Indigenous environmental justice: Anti-colonial action through kinship“
• Collected Murray Bookchin writings at the Anarchist Library
• William Cronon, Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature
• Past AAP episodes of note: James’ interview with JT Roane on plotting the Black Commons and the racial capitalocene; discussion of Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674368224

https://www.law.columbia.edu/faculty/jedediah-s-purdy

Ep. 70 – Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus

John is joined by friends-of-the-show Tyler Tully and Danielle Hanley to discuss Audra Simpson‘s Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Duke UP, 2014). The book — simultaneously a work of political theory, ethnography, and settler colonial studies — thinks with the Kahnawà:ke Mohawks to examine the situated production and assertion of Indigenous political subjectivities, membership(s), sovereignties, knowledges, practices, and much more.

We talk through questions of a politics of refusal (and a politics of recognition and governance by settler states), ongoingness of settler colonialism (and how Simpsons confronts it), race and indigeneity (and why BIPOC might not be so great), Indigenous and settler epistemologies, dispossession and heteropatriarchy, the libidinal economy of white saviorism, and much more. Not to mention, there is extensive and extremely deserved dragging of John Locke. Are we in a post-, de-, and/or anti-colonial frame? Tune in to find out.

And, stay tuned for the glorious return of giving advice to listener questions! We tackle a question about organizing notes, texts, sources, etc., which unsurprisingly becomes a sort of meditation on our own academic trajectories, peccadillos, and bugaboos.

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes or Spotify. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.

Links:

• Simpson’s homepage at Columbia
• Simpson’s 2016 Theory & Event article, “The State Is a Man: Theresa Spence, Loretta Saunders and the Gendered Costs of Settler Sovereignty”
• “Reconciliation and its Discontents: Settler Governance in an Age of Sorrow” lecture by Simpson
• Tyler Tully, “Epistemological Sacrifice Zones and the Decolonization of Religion“
  

Interview: Jane Gordon and Drucilla Cornell on Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg — Epistemic Unruliness 36

This episode, Rachel and John have the honor and pleasure of interviewing Dr. Jane Anna Gordon and Dr. Drucilla Cornell about their new edited volume, Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg. Part of the Creolizing the Canon series, this volume examines the political economy and political philosophies of Polish Marxist thinker and revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, from her work on imperialism and the expanded reproduction of capital, to the violence of fascism, and her theory of primitive accumulation. The volume also considers her reception across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, asking how her work can be expanded and applied in contemporary revolutionary politics.

As you have may have guessed from our podcast series on Luxemburg and our episode on Geraldine Heng, Rachel, Sid, and John have a chapter in the volume! We rethink primitive accumulation as a concept for theories of racial capitalism. For more about the book, check out the book panel from the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung’s Rosa Luxemburg at 150: Revisiting Her Radical Life and Legacy conference from March 2021.

We begin by asking Gordon and Cornell about the concept of “creolization” and its relevance for the work of Luxemburg. Next we turn to ask about racism and capitalism, about social reproduction and Marxist feminism, and about how Rosa’s work points us to the co-constitutive nature of racism, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism. Finally, we ask what Rosa would think about theories of neoliberalism and contemporary forms of imperialism. Join us for this rich discussion of the creolized Rosa Luxemburg’s socialist horizons.

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes or Spotify. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here

Links:

• Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung
• Red Rosa
• “History and Heartbreak: The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg”
• Trailer, Rosa Luxemburg (film)

Ep. 63 – Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch

[Edited to add: Federici published an earlier version of this book in Italian in 1984; the English book Caliban and the Witch, published in 2004, as a synthesis of the earlier work and her ongoing research, thinking, and experiences, including time living in Nigeria in the 1980s. This context bears on our discussions of colonialism and the slave trade in the episode. Thanks to a listener for pointing this out.] 

In this episode, join James, Emily, and John for a discussion of Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation. We attempt to parse her engagement with/extension of Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation, and question whether the figure of the witch in this text is a historical materialist one, a metonymic one, or some combination of the two. We also ask after the analogizing of witch hunts with the slave trade, draw on James’s rich knowledge of witchcraft to interrogate the role of actual witches in the text, think through the idea of capitalism’s historical inevitability, and perhaps even reveal ourselves to be different kinds of Marxists in the process!

Thanks to listener Jonathan Lowell for the request to read Federici. Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.

 

Links:

• Caliban and the Witch @ ak press
• Silvia Federici interview in the Boston Review
• What is Democracy? documentary ft. Federici (dir. Astra Taylor)
• Witch hunts vs. Trump claims of ‘witch hunt!’, at the Boston Review

 

Silvia Federici in 2014. Photo by Marta Jara, used under CC BY-SA 3.0 es license. Found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvia_Federici#/media/File:La_escritora_y_activista_feminista_Silvia_Federici_(cropped).jpg

 

 

Interview: Jason Ortiz on #RickyRenuncia and Puerto Rican Sovereignty Movements – Epistemic Unruliness 26

In this new installment of Epistemic Unruliness, James interviews Jason Ortiz, president of the Connecticut Puerto Rican Agenda, to discuss the recent #RickyRenuncia Uprising in Puerto Rico. To place these protests in their long historical context, Jason and James transport the listeners to the island of Borikén, home of the Taíno Rebellion of 1511, and condense over 500 years of anticolonial movements in Puerto Rican history to a 90-minute conversation. The pair details the various iterations of U.S. colonialism that have ensnared Puerto Ricans in global political economic confrontations over the twentieth century as the Caribbean formed a microcosm of Cold War statecraft, with Puerto Rico and Cuba figuring as proxy theaters for Washington and Moscow’s war games. As the Iron Curtain fell and the new millennium dawned, Puerto Rican colonialism entered a reconfiguring phase with the near-collapse of global financial markets during the Great Recession of 2008 and the subsequent neoliberal austerity regimes it catalyzed. Hurricane María’s devastating landfall in September 2017 served only to amplify the material and political precarity of Boricuas caught in the dual maelstroms of the American Empire and the Anthropocene.

When a team of investigative journalists released a cache of Gov. Ricardo Rosselló’s homophobic, misogynistic, and classist chat messages in July 2019, Puerto Ricans seized the 500-year moment once again and initiated the #RickyRenuncia/#RickyResign Uprising. Nearly a million Boricuas took to the streets of San Juan, (and many more in la diaspora), staring down police tear gas canisters as they banged their pots and danced perreo to reggaeton and trap music, giving new life to the adage of Emma Goldman lore, “if I can’t dance I don’t want to be in your revolution” (Si no puedo perrear, no es mi revolución).

Support us on Patreon to help us upgrade our recording equipment, potentially provide episode transcripts, and more – plus, you may have the chance to jump your request to the top of the request queue. Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the opening and interstitial music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons. For the mp3 of the episode click here.

 

Links:

National Puerto Rican Agenda

Full 889 page cache of Roselló documents from the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo

The New York Times interview with Colectiva Feminista en Construcción who organized the initial protests of the Uprising

Fernando Tormos-Aponte’s Jacobin article “Puerto Rico Rises”

Sandy Plácido’s historicization of Caribbean anti-imperialist movements in The Washington Post

Video montage of “Perreo Combativo” dance protest, July 25, 2019A

NPR coverage of Bad Bunny, Residente, and iLe protest song: “Afilando Los Cuchillos”

Minority Cannabis Business Association

#RickyRenuncia protester. Photo courtesy of Resumen Latinoamerica