Grant Farred on Soweto 1976

The Constantine Principle

Grant Farrred, The Con

Watching Ghana play Germany during the group stages of the 2014 World Cup put me in mind of a pivotal moment in CLR James’ Beyond a Boundary. After a slow first half, the game came alive. Germany’s Mario Götze gave his side the lead with a header that hit his knee on the way into the Ghanaian net; André Ayew, not a player renowned for his aerial power, replied for Ghana with a superbly directed header. Asamoah Gyan cruised past the static German defense to beat Manuel Neuer with a fierce strike to give Ghana the lead. And then Miroslav Klose did what Miroslav Klose does: he nicked a goal from close range. The ball was bobbing around in Ghana’s six yard box from a Bastian Schweinsteiger corner, and Klose was on hand to tuck the ball in. German coach Joachim Löw had played a hunch, bringing on Schweinsteiger and Klose for Sami Khedira and Götze, respectively, and it paid off as the Germans avoided defeat.

Ode to an Arsenal Fan

Grant Farred, The Con

It was a portentous 10 days. Between February 1 and 10 2014, a strong sense of foreboding haunted me.

For the past several years I have communicated with Stuart Hall at least three times a year. I would email him once on his on his birthday, February 3, and twice a football season. Stuart was an Arsenal fan and I am a partisan of God’s Own Team. He told me that he watched Arsenal with his grandsons. My grandfather, I told him, had been an Arsenal fan; at least he wouldn’t be overseeing a divided house.

The Failure of Partial Displacement: In Honour of Stuart Hall

Grant Farred, The Con

“Three months at Oxford persuaded me that it was not my home,” he told the Guardian in 2012. “I’m not English and I never will be. The life I have lived is one of partial displacement. I came to England as a means of escape, and it was a failure.”

There are few events that demand our thinking as much as death. It is difficult enough to find the right words with which to remember the one who has passed; to remember exactly what it is that mattered in the moment of that passing, a moment unavoidably fraught and overwrought with loss, recollection, pain and immense gratitude for the life that was. Producing a language that befits the dead, who are still so alive to us, is a task made inordinately more difficult when the one who is being honoured is an intellectual who made the political use of language his life’s work. When the intellectual in question, as is the case here, gave theoretical gravity to “articulation”, renovated Marxism for our time, made us think about how “encoding” and “decoding” constituted a critical part of our everyday existence, and, perhaps his greatest accomplishment, made us attend to “culture” as though it were an entirely new concept.

You Can Go Home Again,. You Just Can't Stay: Stuart Hall and the. Caribbean Diaspora

You Can Go Home Again,. You Just Can't Stay: Stuart Hall and the. Caribbean Diaspora by TigersEye99

After Mandela, South Africa has far to go to achieve true racial equality

Grant Farred, Ithica Journal

It is at once discordant and historically appropriate that Nelson Mandela’s passing should have been announced by the current South African president, Jacob Zuma. There could not be a sharper contrast between two leaders.

The iconic Mandela, the first democratically elected South African president, champion of racial reconciliation and democracy, has nothing in common with a successor whose tenure is tainted by corruption, personal excess and scandal. Zuma’s presidency has seen the increase, especially in his home province of Kwazulu-Natal, of state violence against poor black citizens; it has also seen the rise of xenophobic violence against foreign blacks, many of them refugees from other African countries.

Grant Farred: Not the Moment After, but the Moment Of

Grant Farred: Not the Moment After, but the Moment Of by TigersEye99

Fanon: Imperative of the Now (Special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on Fanon)

Fanon: Imperative of the Now

Volume 112, Number 1, Winter 2013Grant Farred, Special Issue Editor

Articles

• • Grant Farred

  Imperative of the Now

  South Atlantic Quarterly (2013) 112(1): 1-4; doi:10.1215/00382876-1900549
  • Full Text (PDF)
   
  • References
• Select this article
  • John E. Drabinski

  Fanon’s Two Memories

  South Atlantic Quarterly (2013) 112(1): 5-22; doi:10.1215/00382876-1891206
  • Abstract
   
  • Full Text (PDF)
   
  • References

Everything; or: a short critique of identity politics

by Grant Farred[i]

Identity politics was founded as a critique of the grand narrative, charged with inaugurating a different mode of struggle. Instead of the Great White Man theory of history and politics, identity politics demanded thinking the political in its specificity; it undertook, in the wake of the post-War anti-colonial struggles and the anti-Establishment turmoil that rocked Western societies in the 1960s, the thinking of the Other. Identity politics sought to rearticulate the extant political categories by, inter alia, complicating the workings of class with race; attending to gender and sexual orientation in the campaign for national liberation; foregrounding the constitutive importance of ethnicity in political struggles. However, from its inception identity politics has been haunted by the question of how to think the specific against the grand political narrative.

Fidelity to me, myself and I: the dramatics of a self split and continually reconfigured

by Danielle Bowler

Fidelity to me, myself and I:

the dramatics of a self split and continually reconfigured

Prologue

“The short answer is yes”.

He said it. Quite flippantly. I had asked a question: “If I’m understanding you right, are you saying the existential crisis is indefinite, that coloured people will forever be doing Derridean “double duty” to multiple identities?” …“the short answer is yes”. With that I felt the cracks deepen, pieces break away. And he moved on to the next query. And I alone, heard the crack, louder than the splintering before it, I heard the interminable sound of parts of a soul break into, in two maybe.

Representations of the Intellectual

by Edward Said

The First Lecture, Representations of the Intellectual (30 mins), is here as an MP3: Representations of the Intellectual

A Review by Grant Farred

There is an old tradition in English cricket, one that should have been rendered anachronistic decades ago but was still observed as recently as the 1970's. It is the annual game between the Players and the Gentlemen, a cricket match in which the best Professionals opposed the finest Amateurs at Lords, the sport's international headquarters. The amateurs were cricketers who hailed from the English ruling classes and, after collecting their Oxbridge degrees and their cricket colors, played the game purely for enjoyment.

The Not-Yet Counterpartisan: A New Politics of Oppositionality

Grant Farred

by Grant Farred, South Atlantic Quarterly 103:4, Fall 2004.

The argument in The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, Carl Schmitt’s work that was first translated into English in 2003, is founded upon the title’s central term, nomos. It is salient that, for a concept that is so fundamental to the project, the German political philosopher struggles to define it, to hold it in theoretical place for very long; he is certainly, despite his best efforts, not able to make it mean only one thing. Nomos reveals itself to be a philosophically palimpsestic term, given to eluding the philosopher even as he seeks to pin it down. Deeply grounded in discourses about national sovereignty, about law—and especially international law insofar as it is European, profoundly concerned with colonial history and the ‘‘land appropriation’’ so endemic to that process, with the development of Britain as a naval power that made the sea a new legal realm—it may be appropriate that the nomos proves such a polyvalent concept. Schmitt’s nomos is, in truth, less a fixed concept than a way to understand the transformation from one historical epoch to another.

'Apostrophizing Algeria: The Ghost In Derrida'

by Grant Farred 

This essay is a version of the lecture that Grant Farred gave at the Teach-In at Rhodes University in 2010. It is a draft of a chapter of new book to be titled 'Conciliation'.)

. . . this interminable task, the ghost remains that which gives one the most to think about – and to do.

 Specters of Marx. 

Everywhere one turns in Specters of Marx there are, as we well know, ghosts. Revenant King Hamlet, Hamlet, troubled prince of Denmark, and the King as visor effect. Then there is Karl Marx of The Communist Manifesto, Max Stirner and, the opening ghost and the subject of a memorable Jacques Derrida dedication, the slain South African Communist Party leader Chris Hani.