A Conversation on Race and Critical Theory (with members of the Living Commons Collective)

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

Living Commons is a collective composed by academics, artists, and activists - many of us all three at once - whose practices constitute what we are calling The Underground University. We envision our work as a manifestation of the autonomous spirit actualized in the struggles against global capital, in particular its deadly attack on the public university and its mission. Towards the goal of maintaining, expanding, and radicalizing the aims of critical thought and political engagement, the Living Commons’ publishing initiatives, its books and magazine, have been designed to create an open-ended space for ongoing conversations around themes they raise. In this spirit, the first two books produced by the Living Commons all interrogate the concerns of critical philosophy and theory in relation to the history of racial discourses, a matter that has for centuries not so much been marginalized as produced and oriented in and by philosophy. This panel will present a conversation on the question of race and critical theory among the authors/members of the Living Commons Collective. Nahum Chandler’s inaugural text Toward an African Future - of the Limits of World proposes for theoretical reflection about contemporary historicity the value of the presentation of the global-level historiographical example in the discourse of W. E. B. Du Bois. Referencing works from across the whole of this thinker’s itinerary, it understands Du Bois to have outlined a critical sense of the global-level horizon of the second half of the twentieth century and the opening of the century yet to come, which has now become ours. David Lloyd’s Under Representation: the Aesthetic Discourse of Race reads the philosophical tradition of aesthetics that underlies critical theory as producing a “racial regime of representation” that regulates the ideas of the universal and the common. Less the space of freedom and commonality that it generally claims to be, this aesthetic regime fundamentally constitutes the possibility of thinking the universal, the human, and the modern subject in ways that continue to inform not only the aesthetic, but also the university as an institution. rashné limki’s work concerns the figure of the subaltern as it appears in the context of postcolonial capitalism. Drawing from postcolonial and materialist critique, it posits this appearance as materialised through the entanglement of the human and capital. Given their valence as phenomenological descriptors of ethical and economic value, respectively, it comprehends the subaltern as the object of eradication intended towards the preservation of value under the postcolonial capitalist condition.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• To Be Announced, NA

Individual Presentations

• The Time of Neo-Liberalism Has Not Yet Arrived - Nahum Chandler, University of California, Irvine (CA)

• The Racial Regime of (Aesthetic) Representation - David Lloyd, University of California, Riverside (CA)

• On the Entanglement of the Human and Capital - Rashné Limki, University of Essex (United Kingdom)