democracy

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. 68 – W.E.B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil

Join Emily, B, Sid, and John for a classic AAP text discussion, this time featuring W.E.B. Du Bois’s Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil. Our discussion begins (perhaps unsurprisingly!) with knowledge, education, and epistemology, and spans Du Bois’s analysis of racial capitalism, his materialism, aesthetics, canonization as a political theorist, and more. We interrogate Du Bois as a democratic theorist in his own right, analyze his (maybe) humanism and (maybe) universalism, and ask, what does it mean to read DuBois as a prescient diagnostician of our own political moment (and who is the revolutionary subject?)? While we barely scratch the surface of all this book has to offer (what of “work,” whiteness, poetics, and proto-feminism in this text?!), we welcome you to join us for the close reading, and stay for the water puns!

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. 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:

Gutenberg ebook of Darkwater
NAACP biography of Du Bois
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Du Bois
Du Bois Bibliography at the National Archives
Keisha Blain on Du Bois, Pan-Africanism, and Anti-colonialism
Farah Griffin on Black Feminists and Du Bois
Ange-Marie Hancock on Du Bois and Intersectionality
J. Phillip Thompson on “Capitalism, Democracy, and Du Bois’s Two Proletariats”
Ella Myers on Du Bois and white sadism

Black and white photograph of Du Bois, looking at the camera

W.E.B. Du Bois in 1918; from WikiMedia Commons

First edition of Darkwater; from WikiMedia Commons

Ep. 67 – Joel Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy

In this episode, John and Sid are joined by friend of the podcast Danielle Hanley of Rutgers University to discuss Joel Olson’s The Abolition of White Democracy (2004). Our discussion weaves through a number of pressing questions: How does Olson center Du Bois in political theory debates about American democracy and citizenship? In what ways are Olson’s conceptualizations of “race,” “whiteness,” and “white privilege” precisely the kind of theorizations—politically astute, materially grounded, and non-reductive—that our moment calls for? What does Olson’s analysis of the constitutive relationship between race and American capitalism add to theories of racial capitalism? How does Olson’s vision of “abolition-democracy” expand democratic imaginaries and re-think agency and participation in critical race theory? Instead of turning to the work of Robin DiAngelo and Tim Wise, what if liberals interested in understanding and/or undoing “whiteness” read Olson’s prescient work?

Across our conversation, we find that Olson’s elegant work speaks to our historical and political moment in multiple ways and has much to offer the left, theoretically and practically, within and beyond academia.

Links:

Joel Olson archives, featuring academic and public writing, teaching materials, remembrances, and more
Olson on white democracy and the 99%
The Abolition of White Democracy at University of Minnesota Press

Ep. 66 – Juliet Hooker, Race and the Politics of Solidarity

In this episode, Emily, John, and Sid are joined by friend of the podcast Danielle Hanley of Rutgers University for a discussion of the first half of Juliet Hooker’s 2009 book Race and the Politics of Solidarity. We ask, what is the promise of solidarity and how is it achieved? How does this argument sit differently in liberal theory against democratic theory? What work does the ontological claim of the book do? And it wouldn’t be an episode of the Always Already Podcast without the vulgar Marx question: what about class? Tune in for racial capitalism, whiteness, solidarity in the time of social distance, and more!

Stay tuned for the dramatic return of your (our) two favorite segments: My Tumblr Friend from Canada (but actually from Europe) with an advice question on choosing thesis topics, and a new twist on dream analysis in One or Several (or zero?) Wolves!

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:

“Is Solidarity the Key to Bridging the Racial Divide” (Hooker’s talk begins at 9:05)
Entry on Multiculturalism and Liberalism in the Oxford Handbook
APSA Presidential Taskforce Report on Racial and Class Inequalities by Alvin Tillery and Juliet Hooker. Chronicle of Higher Education report on the same.
Interview on her latest book, Theorizing Race in the Americas (2017)
Contemporary Political Theory symposium on Theorizing Race in the Americas (thanks to Neil Roberts for the suggestion)
South Atlantic Quarterly (open-access) issue edited by Barnor Hesse and Juliet Hooker, After #Ferguson, After #Baltimore: The Challenge of Black Death and Black Life for Black Political Thought
Juliet Hooker (2016) in Political Theory, “Black Lives Matter and the Paradoxes of U.S. Black Politics: From Democratic Sacrifice to Democratic Repair”

via https://www.brown.edu/academics/political-science/about/people/faculty

Ep. 47 – Jürgen Habermas on Secularism and Democracy; Review of Get Out

In this episode of the Always Already Podcast we discuss two distinct, overlapping, and not-so-overlapping essays by Jürgen Habermas: “Three Normative Models of Democracy,” written in 1994, and “Notes on Post-Secular Society,” written in 2008. We begin by asking whether Habermas’ conception of deliberative democracy changes from the first to the second piece, taking into consideration his critiques of liberal democracy and liberalism across both pieces. We ask whether his model of deliberative democracy attempts to decenter the state or society as a whole; the extent to which his model accounts for workers, anti-work, the workplace and labor politics; and the gems of wisdom that he could gain from Marx’s “On the Jewish Question” (Full disclosure: this episode is grounded in the efforts of Emily, John and Rachel to talk out the paper they are co-writing on anti-work politics and democratic theory).

Stick around for a special review/Frantz-Fanon-driven analysis of the new film Get Out by friend of the podcast/Always Already Fanon Correspondent M. Shadee Malaklou. Shadee also helps John answer listener questions about attending a conference and about glee over a frenemy’s failed Kickstarter campaign.

Support us on Patreon to help us upgrade our recording equipment. 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 Leah Dion for the intro music and to B for the outro music. Special thanks to NEW musical feature aster for between-segment music off of their album a l w a y s a l r e a d y (check it out on bandcamp!). Get the mp3 of the episode here.