Review: Darker Than Blue_Gilroy (original) (raw)
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Journal of Popular Music Studies 24(1): 107-113, 2012
From its title, Darker than Blue, the latest collection of articles from renowned cultural theorist Paul Gilroy announces its distinctive tone: melancholic. The moral economies of the black Atlantic world-a terrain which Gilroy has done so much distinctive work to map-are under grave duress from the joint forces of militarism, capitalism, and the deskilling of pseudoparticipatory technology. If Darker than Blue returns to a sequence of culture heroes familiar to readers of Gilroy's earlier work-Theodor (plus a surprising new addition, Harriet Beecher Stowe)-the changes played here have grown increasingly ruminative, even elegiac. It is as if Gilroy hears the depths of negation their work sounds, even as that sound is being steadily muffled by the drone of a glib, affirmative culture.
Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization
2020
Decolonization is a tour de force written by one of the most brilliant and visionary philosophers of our time. This book has never been more relevant at a time when millions have suffered through a terrifying pandemic and then cheered at the courageous and necessary challenge to antiblack racism in the streets of almost every city and town in the United States. In accordance with the mandate to shift the geographies of reason Gordon foregrounds philosophies and political theories of the Global South but only to broaden the reach of such endeavors to move to a universality not bogged down by the violence of colonialism. The great ideals of dignity, freedom, liberation, and justice are defended on every page infused with the lessons and demands of emancipation that inhere in the struggles for decolonization. This is not a trendy book that tries to show us that we have grown out of the great dream of a new species of humanity to use Fanon's telling phrase. The opposite is the case; it calls us and inspires us to fight on for the new 'species.' This book is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the complexities of our time and cherishes the hope that we can create a world worthy of the ideas Gordon eloquently defends." Drucilla Cornell, Research Professor, University of Venda, Professor Emerita at Rutgers University "If you are interested in enlarging the scope of not just knowledge, but also your curiosity in the discipline of philosophy as not just a 'stand-in and interpreter' but instead the fluctuating plane interwoven in 'shifting the geography of reason,' you need to read this book. If you are interested in what can be learned about the connections between what we are used to thinking and our very different ways of thinking, you need to read this book. If you think that 'cultural politics,' 'multiculturalism,' 'diversity,' and 'tolerance' are overused and misused words, you need to read this book. If you are overwhelmed by 'pessimism of the intellect' and hope for some 'optimism of the will,' you need to read this book. Lastly, since you are not going to be traveling so much in the future, maybe you can travel in the different landscapes and different exchanges, by reading this book."
Theory and Racialized Modernity
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 2015
The United States is neither done with race nor with the problem of racism. In this dilemma the U.S. is not alone. In Brazil and much of the rest of Latin America active pigmentocracies still relegate those of African descent and darker skinned indigenous peoples to the lower rungs of society (Gates 2011 ; Gudmunson and Wolfe, 2010 ; Hooker 2009 ; Joseph 2015 ; Telles 2014). Despite a great multiracial democratic revolution and the rise of numerous Black Africans into its economic elite, South Africa is far from done with the deep wounds and legacies of ongoing, vast Black poverty and economic marginalization attendant to its apartheid past (Gibson 2015 ; Nattrass and Seekings, 2001 ; Seekings 2008). Where it was once erected, although subject to much complexity and change in the modern era, the color line endures almost anywhere one looks around the globe. The notion of modernity we typically associate with two intersecting streams of ideas. One of these streams involves ideals of economic growth and development, free markets, and technological innovation. The other stream involves ideals of freedom, egalitarianism, and democracy. With the march forward of these intersecting streams much social thought foretold the withering of old ascriptive inequalities and barriers tied to racial and ethnic distinctions. But as ethnic studies scholar Elisa Joy White (2012) has put it, such "contemporary renderings of modernity are intrinsically flawed because of the structural antecedent of race-based social inequality" (p. 3). One pioneering intellectual, W. E. B. Du Bois, tackled this great problem of modernity: namely, the fusing of capitalism, colonialism, and ethnoracial distinction and hierarchy. As he declared in the opening of chapter two of The Souls of Black Folk , "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,-the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea" (Du Bois [ 1903 ] 2007, p. 8). Despite Du Bois's early emphasis on race as a social cleavage shaping life around the globe and therefore a subject worthy of sustained scholarly attention and empirical research, his theoretical, methodological, and empirical observations for too long were shunted to the margins of scholarship. As we witness the color line enduring well into the new millennium, Du Bois's original insights have risen in analytical relevance and importance.
AM Journal of Art and Media Studies
As stated by Giorgio Agamben, in Western philosophy, potentiality is part of a very long tradition. Potentiality represents one of the central concepts of Western philosophy, already claiming this status with Aristotle, who posited potentiality against actuality, framing it into a specific register of knowledge, to a specific mode of anthropogenesis, to an anthropological machine. However, what does this mean for the politics of potentiality, if, as shown by Marina Gržinić in her book Estetika kibersveta in učinki derealizacije [Aaesthetics of the Cyber World and Effects of Derealisation], in the chapter Zunaj biti [Beyond Being], potentiality is thematised through the tradition of metaphysics as a process that never really comes to an end, incessantly deciding upon what counts as human and what does not. In this respect the aim of this text is threefold: first, to suggest that potentiality is to be examined within the context of the process of anthropogenesis as put forward by Agam...
This paper adds an analysis of social and political constructions of time to Afro-pessimism’s critique, in order to address Kenan Ferguson’s question about the feltness of (un)free dom—what he describes as “debt”—and its relationship to the “less-than-human.” Malaklou argues that this less-than-human, caricatured as the “Black African,” lives in the primordial time of the bush. Her essay thus asks us to reach backwards in time in order to imagine and employ debt as Ferguson wants us to: as an/Other, non-humanist model for being and doing and knowing (and feeling).
Reimagining Black Freedom – Beyond Place and Time
Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry, 2021
In this article, the writings of three prolific writers, Canadian Katherine McKittrick, Canadian-Trinidadian Marlene NourbeSe Philips and American Maya Angelou, intersect at the point of Black liberation and form a singular voice where a reimagined freedom can emerge. The piece begins with McKittrick’s research of Black geographies and what Black freedom as a destination looks like, by way of a fixed Underground Railroad journey to settlements like Ontario’s Negro Creek Road. It further interrogates and reverses the power dynamic between the European colonizer and Black settler, by engaging with Philip’s novel, Harriet’s Daughter. Here, teen protagonist, Margaret, changes the rules of her Underground Railroad game, making it possible for anybody to be a slave. Finally, these ideas are connected to Angelou’s autobiographical accounts of racism in the Deep South and her poetic expressions of hope and freedom through her writings, Caged Bird and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.