Department of Politics &
International Relations, Rhodes University
Constituent Power in the Modern
World: A Brief Introduction
A post-graduate course to be
taught by Richard Pithouse in the first semester, 2015
Throughout
the modern era … constituent power has been in conflict with constituted power,
the fixed power of formal constitutions and central authority. Whereas
constituent power opens each revolutionary process, throwing open the doors to
the forces of change and the myriad desires of the multitude, constituted power
closes down the revolution and brings it back to order. In each of the modern
revolutions, the State rose up in opposition to the democratic and
revolutionary forces and imposes a return to a constituted order, a new
Thermidor, which either recuperated or repressed the constituent impulses. The
conflict between active constituent power and reactive constituted power is
what characterizes these revolutionary experiences.
-
From the introduction to Antonio
Negri’s Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State
(1999)
We currently inhabit a moment
of sustained popular political action in South Africa. This is also a moment
where new forms of popular politics, sometimes insurgent, are appearing in many
parts of the world. In South Africa some of these struggles have, particularly in
their early phases, chosen self-presentation over authorised forms of representation.
Some of these struggles have also organised direct appropriation, especially of
urban land, and forms of disruption, such as road blockades, that exceed the
limits of both the liberalism to which our society is formally committed and
the various disciplinary discourses and practices (which also often operate
beyond the limits of liberalism) available to the forms of nationalism that
conflate the nation with the ruling party and the state. This escalating
sequence of popular protest has reactionary aspects as well as aspects that are
potentially emancipatory.
For many years popular protest
was largely ignored by elite actors. When it was engaged it was often
presented, sometimes as a question that was essentially a matter of policing,
as a backdrop to real politics. However although it has never been centrally
organised, or formally networked, the scale and tenacity of popular protest
over the last decade has increasingly brought it towards the centre of public
life. Competing elites are now seeking to capture popular protest by presenting
themselves as radical or even revolutionary vanguards.
This course offers students an
opportunity to think, in a community of inquiry, about a range of forms of
insurgent forms of popular politics in the modern world - and to do so outside
of the constraints of the liberal and statist paradigms that often constituent
the common sense of the university. This course will run for one semester and
so it cannot be comprehensive and has many striking omissions. Nonetheless its range
across space and time is sufficient to make it an introduction to actual
practices of constituent power that avoids both Eurocentricism and
parochialism. It will offer useful resources to equip students to begin to
engage the concept of constituent power outside of the old and often stolid
dogmas that so often stifle the radical imagination in the South Africa.
The recommended reading is
entirely voluntary but participants in the course are encourage to read at
least some of those texts in the list of recommended books that pertain to
their specific interests.
A Selection
of Generally Recommended Theoretical Texts
- Alain Badiou The Communist Invariant (2010)
- Cornelius Castoriadis Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy (1991)
- Frantz Fanon The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
- Silvia Federici Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (2012)
- David Goldberg Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (1993)
- Kenneth Good Trust in the Capacities of the People, Distrust in Elites (2014)
- Lewis Gordon & Jane Anna Gordon Of Divine Warning: Disaster in a Modern Age (2010)
- Ranajit Guha The Small Voice of History (2013)
- Peter Hallward Absolutely Postcolonial (2001)
- Paget Henry Caliban’s Reason (2000)
- John Holloway Change the World Without Taking Power (2002)
- Domenico Losurdo Liberalism: A Counter History (2011)
- Walter Mignolo The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (2011)
- Nick Nesbitt Caribbean Critique: Antillean Critical Theory from Toussaint to Glissant (2014)
- Nivedita Menon Seeing Like a Feminist (2012)
- Antonio Negri Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (1999)
- Jacques Rancière Disagreement (1998)
- Cedric Robinson Black Marxism (1983)
- Uday Singh Metha Liberalism & Empire (1999)
- Michel-Rolph Trouillot Silencing the Past (1997)
A Selection of Generally Recommended Books on Popular Struggles
- Alain Badiou The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings (2012)
- Asef Bayat Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (2009)
- George Ciccariello-Maher We Created Chávez: A People's History of the Venezuelan Revolution (2013)
- Roberta M. Feldman & Susan Stall The Dignity of Resistance: Women Residents' Activism in Chicago Public Housing (2006)
- Sujatha Fernandes Who Can Stop the Drums?: Urban Social Movements in Chávez’s Venezuela (2010)
- James Holston Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil (2009)
- Alex Khasnabish Zapatistas: Rebellion from the Grassroots to the Global (2010)
- Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos Our Word Is Our Weapon: Selected Writings (2011)
- Frances Fox Piven & Richard Cloward Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (1978)
- Srila Roy Remembering Revolution: Gender, Violence, and Subjectivity in India’s Naxalbari Movement (2013)
Seminar Schedule
Seminar One, 16 February 2015: On the Cusp of the Modern (Part One)
Compulsory Reading
Paul Landau Popular Politics in the History of South Africa,
1400–1948 (2013)
Recommended Reading
Norman Etherington The Great Treks (2001)
Noel Mostert Frontiers (1992)
Seminar Two, 23 February 2015: On the Cusp of the Modern (Part Two)
Compulsory Reading
Peter Linebaugh & Markus
Rediker The Many Headed Hydra (2001)
Recommended Reading
Luther Blisset Q (1999)
E.P. Thompson The Making of the English Working Class
(1963)
Silvia Federici Caliban & the Witch (2004)
Peter Linebaugh The London Hanged (1991)
Seminar Three, 2 March 2015: The French Revolution
Compulsory Reading
Eric Hazan A People’s History of the French Revolution
(2014)
Recommended Reading
Daniel Guérin Class Struggle in the First French Republic
(1977)
Eric Hobsbawm The Age of Revolution 1789-1848 (1996)
Jonathan Israel Revolutionary Ideas (2014)
Georges Lefebvre The French Revolution (1962)
Seminar Four, 9 March 2015: The Haitian Revolution
Compulsory Reading
Nick Nesbitt Universal Emancipation (2008)
Recommended Reading
Robin Blackburn The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery (2011)
Carolyn Fick The Making of Haiti (1990)
C.L.R. James The Black Jacobins (1938)
Toussaint L'Ouverture The Haitian Revolution (2008)
Michel-Rolph Trouillot Silencing the Past (1997)
Seminar Five, 16 March 2015: Revolution and Reaction in Spain
Compulsory Reading
Chris Ealham Class,
culture and conflict in Barcelona, 1898-1937 (2014)
Recommended Reading
Ronald Fraser Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the
Spanish Civil War (1979)
George Orwell Homage to Catalonia (1938)
Abel Paz Durruti in the Spanish Revolution (2006)
Hugh Thomas The Spanish Civil War (1961)
Lucien van der Walt and
Michael Schmidt Black Flame (2009)
Recommended Film
Ken Loach Land & Freedom (1995)
Seminar Six, 23 March 2015: The Industrial & Commercial Workers’
Union
Compulsory Reading
Helen Bradford A Taste of Freedom (1987)
Recommended Reading
A.W.G. Champion The Views of Mahlathi (1982)
E. David Cronon Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and
the Universal Negro Improvement Association (1995)
Clements Kadalie My Life and the ICU (1970)
Paul la Hausse The Struggle for the City: Alcohol, the
eMatsheni and Popular Culture in Durban, 1902-1936 M.A. thesis, University
of Cape Town (1984)
Seminar Seven, 13 April 2015: Anti-Colonial War in Africa
Compulsory Reading
Frantz Fanon A Dying Colonialism (1959)
Recommended
Reading
Donald L. Barnett & Karari
Njama Mau Mau From Within (1968)
Shimmer Chinodya Harvest of Thorns (1990)
Mandla Langa The Texture of Shadows (2014)
Tanya Lyons Guns and Guerilla Girls: Women in the
Zimbabwean National Liberation Struggle (2004)
Ousmane Sembène Gods Bits of Wood (1960)
Yvonne Vera The Stone Virgins (2002)
Recommended Films
Gillo Pontecorvo The Battle of Algiers (1966)
Göran Olsson Concerning Violence (2014)
Seminar Eight, 20 April 2015: May ’68
Compulsory Reading
Kristin Ross May ’68 and its Afterlives (2002)
Recommended Reading
Tariq Ali Street Fighting Years (1987)
H. Bourges Student Revolt: The Activists Speak
(19680
Roger Gregoire and Fredy
Perlman Worker-Student Action Committees,
France May '68 (1970)
Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit
Obsolete Communism: A Left-Wing
Alternative (1968)
Seminar Nine, 27 April 2015: The
Black Power Moment in the United States
Compulsory Reading
Angela Davis An Autobiography (1974)
Recommended Reading
James Car: BAD: The Autobiography of James Carr
(1975)
George Jackson Soledad Brother
The Prison Letters of George Jackson
(1971)
Peniel E. Joseph Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative
History of Black Power in America (2007)
Manning Marable Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention is a
biography of Malcolm X (2012)
Assata Shakur An Autobiography (1987)
Akinyele Omowale Umoja We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the
Mississippi Freedom Movement (2013)
Malcom X The Autobiography of Malcom X (1965)
Recommended Film
Göran Olsson The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (2011)
Seminar Ten, 4 May 2015: Latin
America in the 70s
Compulsory Reading
Eduardo Galeano Days and Nights of Love and War (1978)
Recommended Reading
Pilar Aguilera Chile: The
Other September 11: Reflections and Commentaries on the 1973 Coup in Chile
(2006)
Hugo Blanco Land or Death: The Peasant Struggle in Peru
(1972)
Fidel Castro The Declarations of Havana (2008)
Régis Debray Conversations with Allende: Socialism in
Chile (1971)
James Dunkerley Rebellion in the Veins: Political Struggle
in Bolivia, 1952-1982 (1984)
Eduardo Galeano Open Veins of Latin America (1971)
Che Guevara Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War
(1963)
Gustavo Gutiérrez A Theology of Liberation (1971)
Pablo Neruda The Sea and the Bells (1973)
Pablo Neruda Memoirs (1974)
Henri Weber Nicaragua: The Sandinist Revolution
(1981)
Matilde Zimmermann Sandinista: Carlos Fonseca and the
Nicaraguan Revolution (2001)
Seminar Eleven, 11 May 2015: Recent Resistance and Repression in Haiti
Compulsory Reading
Peter Hallward Damming the Flood (2010)
Recommended Reading
Jean-Bertrand Aristide In the Parish of the Poor (1990)
Jean-Bertrand Aristide Eyes of the Heart (2000)
Paul Farmer AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography
of Blame (1992)
Michael Griffin and Jennie
Weiss Block In the Company of the Poor:
conversations between Dr. Paul Farmer and Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez (2013)
Justin Podur Haiti's New Dictatorship (2012)
Jeb Sprague Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy
in Haiti (2012)
Seminar Twelve, 18 May 2015: The Return to Popular Struggle in
Post-Apartheid South Africa
Compulsory Reading
Nigel Gibson Fanonian Practices (2011)
Recommended Reading
Sakhela Buhlungu A Paradox of Victory: COSATU and the
democratic transition in South Africa (2012)
Church Land Programme Living Learning (2009)
Jane Duncan The Rise of the Securocrats (2014)
Gillian Hart Rethinking the South African Crisis:
Nationalism, Populism, Hegemony (2013)
Michael Neocosmos From Foreign Natives to Native Foreigners:
Explaining Xenophobia in South Africa (2006 & 2010)
Symphony Way Pavement Dwellers
No Land! No House! No Vote! Voices from
Symphony Way (2011)
Ineke van Kessel "Beyond Our Wildest Dreams": The
United Democratic Front and the Transformation of South Africa (2000)
Elke Zuern The Politics of Necessity (2011)
Recommended Films
Dara Kell & Chris Nizza Dear Mandela (2011)
Rehad Desai Miners Shot Down (2013)
Seminar Thirteen, 25 May 2015: Bolivia and the ‘Epistemological
Earthquake’
Compulsory Reading
Raquel Gutierrez Aguilar Rhythms of the Pachakuti (2014)
Recommended Reading
June Nash We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us (1993)
Jeffery Webber Red October: Left-Indigenous Struggles in
Modern Bolivia (2011)
Raul Zibechi Dispersing Power: Social Movements as
Anti-State Forces (2010)
Raul Zibechi Territories in Resistance (2012)
