whiteness

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.

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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.

 

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

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

 

Blue-on-blue cover of Darkwater

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.

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.

 

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Image of book cover, with the title in alternative red, white, and grey text on a black background

 

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.

 

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Image of book cover of Race and the Politics of Solidarity

 

Ep. 64 – Robin James, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics

This long overdue episode brings James, B, and John together for a discussion of Robin James’s most recent book, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics, focusing on the Introduction and Chap. 1. The AAP team starts with a reparative approach to the text’s central set of questions. What is the qualitative side to neoliberalism’s quantitative, rationalizing regime of knowledge? How does music and its study anticipate and, by dint of metaphor, reproduce the neoliberal mathesis? How does the sonic actually enable the subordination of historically marginalized groups?

To these questions the team has many varied but passionate responses. Some include questions about the book’s large, diffuse archive to question its central critique about capitalism and sound. Others explore the totalizing thematic of “neoliberalism” and its usefulness in discussing pop music, representation, and race, as in the book’s reading of Taylor Swift’s financialized neoliberal whiteness. But all invite listeners to ponder the political consequences of the text’s emphasis on music’s power to alter the allegories theorists use to tell stories about the world we share.

Thanks to Patreon supporter Roddy for the request to read R. James. 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.

 

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Image: Cover of The Sonic Episteme