In our view, this is a critical puzzle for the left to solve, and one we need to give a lot more thought to. After all, progressives of various stripes have elected quite a few candidates over the years, particularly at the municipal level (mayors from Harold Washington to Jean Quan), but also the state level (governors, Congress and Senate), and, in some countries, even to the presidency. But what happens once they get into office? If we look at examples in other capitalist countries, we see that the socialist or labor politicians are often equally responsible for austerity measures and attacks on unions, immigrants, and the environment.
Excerpts as I read: “The Gentrification of the Mind”
Sharing passages that resonate with me, as I read Sarah Schulman’s “The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination,” a memoir on the AIDS crisis, its legacy of political resistance, and the rise of gay assimilation and neoliberalism. Emphases are mine.
On reunion, and the celebration and burden of heroes and freaks (p. 5)
Everyone had suffered profoundly from that magic combination of the mass death of their friends and the mass indifference of government, families, and society. We were laughing and smiling and hugging and flirting, as we always had with each other, but somehow it was being among each other that was the most normalizing. I looked at my friends from ACT UP and I saw people who were somehow both heroes and freaks, because they had achieved the impossible and paid the high price of alienation brought by knowledge, as freaks and heroes always do.
The Spirit Was...: A New Queer Agenda finally hit the online new stands!
Hello the internet!
Specifically the POC centered, gender self determining, queer liberation, disability & economic justice internet!
I co-authored a chapter in Queers for Economic Justice’s ebook, A New Queer Agenda with my sibling Che & AJ Lewis about queer & trans people resisting police violence. after many years in limbo, The Scholar & Feminist Online journal published by the Barnard Center for Research on Women published it! it finally hits online newstands today! We wrote it in 2009, but clearly police violence hasn’t stopped, nor has our resistance, so IMHO its still relevant! its also filled with beautiful photos by Syd London!
You can read it here:
(via imanihenry)
Source: thespiritwas
And here we are,
cathedrals in our thighs
banana trees for breasts
and history all mixed up
saxophones in our voices
when we scream
the love of rhythms
inherent
when we dancethey can latin here
and shoot you
for the wrong glance
eyes that kill
eyes that kill
Jessica Hagedorn. “Song for my Father” in Brown River, White Ocean, edited by Luis Francia, 1993
Societies Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology by Pierre Clastres
“The thesis is radical,” writes Marshall Sahlins of this landmark text in anthropology and political science. “We conventionally define the state as the regulation of violence; it may be the origin of it. Clastres’s thesis is that economic expropriation and political coercion are inconsistent with the character of tribal society - which is to say, with the greater part of human history.”Can there be a society that is not divided into oppressors and oppressed, or that refuses coercive state apparatuses? In this beautifully written book, Pierre Clastres offers examples of South American Indian groups that, although without hierarchical leadership, were both affluent and complex. In so doing he refutes the usual negative definition of tribal society and poses its order as a radical critique of our own Western state of power.Born in 1934, Pierre Clastres was educated at the Sorbonne; throughout the 1960s he lived with Indian groups in Paraguay and Venezuela. From 1971 until his death in 1979 he was Director of Studies at the fifth section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris and held the Chair of Religion and Societies of the South American Indians there.Robert Hurley is the translator of the History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault and cotranslator of Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
(via queerandpresentdanger)
Source: on-anthropology
Someday, emerging at last from the violent insight,
let me sing out jubilation and praise to assenting angels.
Let not even one of the clearly-struck hammers of my heart
fail to sound because of a slack, a doubtful,
or a broken string. Let my joyfully streaming face
make me more radiant; let my hidden weeping arise
and blossom. How dear you will be to me then, you nights
of anguish. Why didn’t I kneel more deeply to accept you,
inconsolable sisters, and, surrendering, lose myself
in your loosened hair. How we squander our hours of pain.
How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration
to see if they have an end. Though they are really
our winter-enduring foliage, our dark evergreen,
one season in our inner year—, not only a season
in time—, but are place and settlement, foundation and soil and home.
Rainer Maria Rilke. Duino Elegies. “The Tenth Elegy.” Translated by Stephen MItchell.
As Black women, we do not have the privilege or the space to call ourselves “slut” without validating the already historically entrenched ideology and recurring messages about what and who the Black woman is. We don’t have the privilege to play on destructive representations burned in our collective minds, on our bodies and souls for generations. Although we understand the valid impetus behind the use of the word “slut” as language to frame and brand an anti-rape movement, we are gravely concerned. For us the trivialization of rape and the absence of justice are viciously intertwined with narratives of sexual surveillance, legal access and availability to our personhood. It is tied to institutionalized ideology about our bodies as sexualized objects of property, as spectacles of sexuality and deviant sexual desire. It is tied to notions about our clothed or unclothed bodies as unable to be raped whether on the auction block, in the fields or on living room television screens. The perception and wholesale acceptance of speculations about what the Black woman wants, what she needs and what she deserves has truly, long crossed the boundaries of her mode of dress.
New Museum: We Who Feel Differently
“Who We Feel Differently” is an exciting multi-instance project by artist Carlos Motta at the New Museum, which plays host to a global dialogue on queerness, sexual politics, trans/gender justice, social/economic/racial justice, AIDS and health vis-a-vis gay assimilation/neoliberalist politics (like military and marriage). In the Museum as Hub on the fifth floor, the site installation showcases video interviews with 50 activists, academics, and artists, as well as art/painting/illustration.
We Who Feel Differently moves outside the space with a series of performances and talks over several months, including trans/gender justice (6/7) and anti-assimilation/queer liberation political collective Against Equality (6/21). Seriously hot.
The exhibit is mirrored on a website that includes video and transcripts of the interviews: http://www.wewhofeeldifferently.info
“Museum as Hub: Carlos Motta: We Who Feel Differently” is a multipart project that explores the idea of sexual and gender “difference” after four decades of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex, Queer, and Questioning politics. Through an exhibition, series of events, and an opening symposium, the project seeks to invigorate discussion around a queer “We” that looks beyond tolerance or assimilation toward a concept of equality that provides for greater personal freedom. The project draws from Motta’s evolving database documentary wewhofeeldifferently.info, which proposes “difference” as a profound mode of possibility for both solidarity and self-determination.
The exhibition features a video installation based on fifty interviews with an international and intergenerational group of LGBTIQQ academics, activists, artists, politicians, researchers, and radicals. Motta has identified five thematic threads from this research that address subjects ranging from activism to intimacy, art to immigration. Drawing upon early queer symbols and imagery, a series of new sculptures and prints situates narratives of the LGBTIQQ movement in dialogue with developments in art and history, while also considering their critical significance in contemporary queer discourse and culture at large. The design of the Museum as Hub by Carlos Motta and architect Daniel Greenfield—anchored by the installation of multicolored carpeting—gives the gallery an aesthetic and functional makeover that invites extended viewing and collective activity.
The exhibition is curated by Eungie Joo, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Programs.
Source: newmuseum.org
Organizing Upgrade: “Are Elections Enough to Actually Move Towards Social Justice? Stephanie Luce and Saulo Colon”
A piece building on Bob Wing’s article on inside-outside strategy, focusing on governance strategy and a radical lens on democracy, via Helena:
…while we appreciate much of what they suggest we feel they discuss electoral strategy as if the answer is just a “changing of the guards” which doesn’t take into account the role and functions of the state. We found much of Bob’s piece persuasive, but feel he gives too little attention to a crucial piece of the puzzle, which he mentions briefly as the fourth point in his proposal where he writes: “we must have a governance strategy, not a strategy just of ‘influence’ or ‘impacting public policy and debate.’”
UK Government’s Open Design Principles
Human-centered design principles from the UK government. Publicly posting them as an working document shares intent and process/guardrails, and showing case studies points to bright spots for the destination they’re bring to reach and the status of their progress toward it.
Source: gov.uk
NYT: A Charity for Children of New York’s South Asian Working Class
Nice profile of South Asian Youth Action (SAYA):
The nonprofit organization has a presence in seven schools, which are all in Queens except for one in Brooklyn, and a gurdwara, a Sikh temple, but its main base is a community center in Elmhurst, a Queens neighborhood, where kids can come after school or on weekends to play basketball, get tutoring, do their homework, meet with counselors or simply hang out.
The majority of SAYA youth are of Guyanese, Bangladeshi, Indian and Pakistani descent, said Udai Tambar, SAYA’s executive director, and each of the organization’s sites reflects the ethnic subgroup that is largest in that neighborhood. SAYA offers ethnicity-specific counseling, and it bills itself as the nation’s only secular youth organization for South Asians.
“If you think of identity as a Venn diagram where the different circles represent the different parts of their identity, SAYA creates a safe space for youth to explore how these circles overlap,” Mr. Tambar said. “By being a secular space, we allow youth to explore what their religion and its overlap with other parts of their identity means for them.”
So far, about 7,700 youths have participated in SAYA’s programs. According to Mr. Tambar, 100 percent of those who have participated in its Chalo College have gone on to enroll in a university, including top schools like Barnard and New York University.
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