Lewis Gordon, Nigel Gibson and Achille Mbembe Speak on Fanon in Johannesburg

Nivedita Menon: Women's Rights to Land - The challenge of the commons.

Book Launch: Lewis Gordon's 'What Fanon Said'

Toward a Political Economy of Death OR The Threat/Fear of Death as the Fundamental Mode of Coercion

Zibechi: Red-hot interest in Fanon

Raúl Zibechi, Chiapas Support Committee

Frantz Fanon’s thinking has returned. Five decades after his death, his books are being read again in universities and in spaces of the organized popular sectors. Some of his central reflections enlighten aspects of the new realities and they contribute to the comprehension of capitalism in this stage of blood and pain for those below.

Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar on 'The community reproduction of life: Thinking of social trans-formation in the present'

Lewis Gordon on Race and Gender from the Standpoint of Sartre’s Philosophical Anthropology.

Achille Mbembe on The State of South African Political Life

Achille Mbembe

Achille Mbembe, Africa is a Country

In these times of urgency, when weak and lazy minds would like us to oppose “thought” to “direct action”; and when, precisely because of this propensity for “thoughtless action”, everything is framed in the nihilistic terms of power for the sake of power  – in such times what follows might mistakenly be construed as contemptuous.

Ashraf Jamal, Xolela Mangcu, Hlonipha Mokoena and Crain Soudien debate race in post-apartheid SA.

They Die Out There: It Matters Not Where, Nor How

Richard Pithouse, CounterPunch

On Monday morning there was a protest, in the form of a road blockade, organised from a shack settlement in Durban, South Africa. The settlement, officially known as Quarry Road but popularly known as KwaMam’Suthu, is on a sliver of land that runs along a river bank squeezed between two busy roads. It is in the suburbs to the North of the city. The current sequence of open contestation between people occupying land in the interstices of this part of the city and the local state stretches back to the ‘80s. It has a prior history that, before the mass evictions of the ‘50s and ‘60s, came to a head in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s. Over the last decade it has ebbed and flowed as the state has alternated between offering material and political concessions and responding to struggle with increasingly violent repression. Recently things have been getting hot again. Last month residents from the nearby Kennedy Road settlement burnt a municipal truck during two days of protest.

Chika Mba: A Humanistic Critique of Cultural Essentialism

Hlonipha Mokoena: Public Lecture & Masterclass

The ‘African university’ as a site of protest

Paddy O’Halloran, Pambazuka

Photographs of dozens of black intellectuals, artists and revolutionaries decorate the walls of the Black Student Movement Commons, formerly the Council Chambers, at the university currently known as Rhodes in Grahamstown, South Africa. Among the many people honoured there are Angela Davis, Steve Biko, Albertina and Walter Sisulu, Bob Marley, Frantz Fanon, Ellen Kuzwayo, Frederick Douglass, Maya Angelou, Robert Sobukwe, Harriet Tubman and Malcom X. Unlike the dreary portraits of Vice-Chancellors of bygone years that hang in the hallways outside the doors of the Commons, the many faces stuck up by the Black Student Movement (BSM) exude no pomp, none of the unearned arrogance of tradition, nor the security of age-old hierarchy. The assemblage of poets, fighters and thinkers provide inspiration for BSM members, who have occupied the Chambers for two weeks demanding a long-term resolution to the problem of vacation accommodation in university residences as a first practical step toward transforming their university.

SA must transcend Big Man politics

Simamkele Dlakavu, The Star

Johannesburg - It was one of those student protests, the kind of protests at our universities that have become a norm again in this country.

I don’t remember the exact issue of contestation that day, because they are so many. We might have been protesting against the financial exclusion of hundreds of students; or it might have been a protest against the dehumanising treatment of our outsourced mothers and fathers. Or it could have been another protest where we sought to be reflected in a curriculum that is still centered on colonial thinking.

The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview

Sylvia Wynter Humanism by kgms21 on Scribd

Policing student politics: Is there a ‘right’ way to protest?

Jonis Ghedi Alasow, The Daily Maverick

On Friday 28 August the Black Student Movement (BSM) at the institution still known as Rhodes University reached a watershed moment in its short history. University management called armed police officers – with dog units – to confront students who wished to address the University senate on accommodation during the short vacations. There was an overwhelming sense of fierceness among the police, dog units and university campus protection.

Michael Neocosmos on the Thought of Politics

A Masterclass with Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar

Decolonizing critical thought and rebellions II

Gilberto López y Rivas, Chiapas Support Committee

The construction of another world in Latin America, according to Raúl Zibechi, is being carried out by means of organizations not state-centric nor hierarchical, which at times don’t even have permanent leadership teams and, as a consequence, tend to overcome bureaucracy, a traditional, elemental and very old form of domination. Women and youth play a new role in these new “modes of doing.”