To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice

by Walter Johnson, The Boston Review

In Memory of Cedric Robinson (1940–2016)

It is a commonplace to say that slavery “dehumanized” enslaved people, but to do so is misleading, harmful, and worth resisting.

I hasten to add that there are, of course, plenty of right-minded reasons for adopting the notion of “dehumanization.” It is hard to square the idea of millions of people being bought and sold, of systematic sexual violation, natal alienation, forced labor, and starvation with any sort of “humane” behavior: these are the sorts of things that should never be done to human beings. By terming these actions “inhuman” and suggesting that they either relied upon or accomplished the “dehumanization” of enslaved people, however, we are participating in a sort of ideological exchange that is no less baleful for being so familiar. We are separating a normative and aspirational notion of humanity from the sorts of exploitation and violence that history suggests may well be definitive of human beings: we are separating ourselves from our own histories of perpetration. To say so is not to suggest that there is no difference between the past and the present; it is merely that we should not overwrite the complex determinations of history with simple-minded notions of moral progress.

Sylvia Wynter: No Humans Involved - An Open Letter to My Colleagues

No Humans Involved an Open Letter to My Colleagues by SYLVIA WYNTER by TigersEye99

The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview

Sylvia Wynter Humanism by kgms21 on Scribd

Sylvia Wynter: Human Being as Noun? or Being Human as Praxis - Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn: A Manifesto

Human Being as Noun? Or Being Human as Praxis? Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn: A Manifesto by TigersEye99 on Scribd

Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument

Sylvia Wynter The Creation of Race by vulgarmilk on Scribd

For Those We Cannot Grieve

Nina Butler, The Con

There has been a Hebrew Facebook page circulating that demands the murder of one Palestinian every hour that the three Israeli teenagers, who disappeared on June 12 while hitchhiking late at night in the West Bank, are missing. The dead bodies of the three teens were found two nights ago near Hebron. Although evidence is yet to be publically released, the Israeli government claims that Hamas is responsible, and it would seem as though the Israeli military is set on carrying out the desire of the 20 000-plus facebookers who ‘liked’ this page. The social media page is premised upon the assumption that ‘Palestinians’ (the entire populace) are behind this, and so has been the Israeli Defence Forces’ campaign of collective punishment – Operation Brother’s Keeper – over the past 18 days that has resulted in the imprisonment of more than 500 Palestinians, the death of six mostly male youths of the same age as the missing Israeli teens, and the destruction and invasion of more than 1 000 homes, offices and buildings. Now that the inexcusable and disgraceful crime of the abduction and killing of three Israeli lives has come to a head, all indications are that the ‘operation’ of collective punishment will evolve into a large-scale mission in multiple forms of vengeance – aimed at harming yet more innocent young lives.

Prospects for a Happy but Contested Future: The Promise of Revolutionary Humanism

by David Harvey, The White Review

From time immemorial there have been human beings who have believed that they could construct, individually or collectively, a better world for themselves than that which they had inherited. Quite a lot of them also came to believe that in the course of so doing it might be possible to remake themselves as different if not better people. I count myself among those who believe in both these propositions. In Rebel Cities, for example, I argued that ‘the question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from the question of what kind of people we want to be, what kinds of social relations we seek, what relations to nature we cherish, what style of life we desire, what aesthetic values we hold’. The right to the city, I wrote, is ‘far more than a right of individual or group access to the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change and re-invent the city more after our heart’s desire … The freedom to make and remake ourselves and our cities is … one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.’[1] Perhaps for this intuitive reason, the city has been the focus throughout its history of an immense outpouring of utopian desires for happier futures and less alienating times.

Lewis Gordon - "Living Thought, Living Freedom: A Lecture in Black Existential Philosophy"

Humanism, creativity and rights: invoking Henri Lefebvre’s right to the city in the tension presented by informal settlements in South Africa today

Humanism, creativity and rights: invoking Henri Lefebvre’s right to the city in the tension presented by informal settlements in South Africa today by TigersEye99

A Path Through the Embers and into the Agora?

A Path Through the Embers and into the Agora?

- Notes on the Necessity for our Democratic Imagination to Take Better Measure of the World

Richard Pithouse

Retrieving life and the human from waste

Achille Mbembe has argued that the rendering of human beings as waste by the interface of racism and capitalism in South Africa means that “for the democratic project to have any future at all, it should necessarily take the form of a conscious attempt to retrieve life and 'the human' from a history of waste”. He adds that “the concepts of 'the human', or of 'humanism', inherited from the West will not suffice. We will have to take seriously the anthropological embeddedness of such terms in long histories of "the human" as waste.” Mbembe is not the first to want to hold on to the idea of the human in the face of the systemic denial of the full and equal humanity of all people and to insist that the idea of the human needs to be delinked from what Aimé Césairecalled 'pseudo-humanism' – colonial particularities masquerading as universal. Césaire aspired to “a true humanism . . . a humanism made to the measure of the world”. Steve Biko envisioned a “true humanity”.

A Path Through the Embers and into the Agora?

A Path Through the Embers and into the Agora?

- Notes on the Necessity for our Democratic Imagination to Take Better Measure of the World

Richard Pithouse

Achille Mbembe has argued that the rendering of human beings as waste by the interface of racism and capitalism in South Africa means that “for the democratic project to have any future at all, it should necessarily take the form of a conscious attempt to retrieve life and 'the human' from a history of waste”. He adds that “the concepts of 'the human', or of 'humanism', inherited from the West will not suffice. We will have to take seriously the anthropological embeddedness of such terms in long histories of "the human" as waste.” Mbembe is not the first to want to hold on to the idea of the human in the face of the systemic denial of the full and equal humanity of all people but to insist that the idea of the human needs to be delinked from what Aimé Césaire called 'pseudo-humanism' – colonial particularities masquerading as universal. Césaire aspired to “a true humanism....a humanism made to the measure of the world”. Steve Biko envisioned a “true humanity”.

Humanism, Antihumanism & the Radical Tradition

Edited extract from The Meaning of Race (Macmillan, 1996), pp 236-242, Kenan Malik

Associated with the anti-universalist stance of poststructuralist theories has been an unremitting hostility to a humanist approach. At the heart of humanism are two key ideas. First, humanists hold that human beings, while an inherent part of nature and subject to its laws, nevertheless have an exceptional status in nature because of the unique ability, arising out of human rationality and sociability, to overcome the constraints placed upon them by nature. Second, humanists believe in the unity of humankind, holding that all humans possess something in common, a something that is often described as a common ‘human nature’.

E. San Juan, Jr: Edward Said's Affiliations; Secular Humanism and Marxism

E. San Juan, Jr. - Edward Said's Affiliations; Secular Humanism and Marxism by Che Brandes-Tuka

Onwards with Integrity

Njabulo Ndebele

by Njabulo Ndebele, City Press

Quest for an honest society necessitates an honest struggle for it. You are the way you struggle

Amílcar Cabral, the great African revolutionary who led Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde’s struggle against Portuguese colonialism, combined a strong ­intellect with a deep passion for his country and its people.

Although his admirers are probably aware of the saying “tell no lies . . . claim no easy victories”, they might not be aware of the full context from which it is extracted.

“Hide nothing from the masses of our people,” begins the full quote. “Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy ­victories.”

Sweet Home: Behind Shack Doors

The Enduring Horror of South Africa

by Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

In her recently republished autobiography Emma Mashinini, the grand old lady of the trade union movement, ascribes the deep roots of her steadfast political commitment to a desire to assert that: “I am human. I exist. I am a complete person.”

This may strike some people as naïve in a country where many of the discourses contending for influence in the elite public sphere are frequently weighed down with the dead hand of stolid jargon, mediated through everything from Stalinism, to the language of the World Bank or human rights. But the constant mobilisation of all this jargon - 'deepening and advancing the national democratic revolution',  'achieving labour market flexibility', 'building social cohesion', 'extending participatory developmental instruments', 'gender mainstreaming' -  is not just about establishing and sustaining a distance between contending experts and the people with a view to legitimating the power of experts over the people. And it’s not just about the dark art of saying nothing of consequence while trying to sound informed and intelligent. In some cases, like the recent claim by the SACP and COSATU in KwaZulu-Natal that 'renewed imperialist aggression' aims, with the support of various local allies, to have Zuma removed from the Presidency in order to 'recolonise this country', we are dealing with language that is paranoid, fantastical, grossly authoritarian and plainly Orwellian.

Orientalism

Edward Said, CounterPunch 

Nine years ago I wrote an afterword for Orientalism which, in trying to clarify what I believed I had and had not said, stressed not only the many discussions that had opened up since my book appeared in 1978, but the ways in which a work about representations of "the Orient" lent itself to increasing misinterpretation. That I find myself feeling more ironic than irritated about that very same thing today is a sign of how much my age has crept up on me. The recent deaths of my two main intellectual, political and personal mentors, Eqbal Ahmad and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, has brought sadness and loss, as well as resignation and a certain stubborn will to go on.

Achille Mbembe to deliver a second “Thinking Africa” Public Lecture

Prof Achille Mbembe is to deliver the Second Annual Rhodes University Thinking Africa Project Public Lecture on  "Frantz Fanon on the Subject of Emancipation"  to be held  on 12 July, 2012 at the Rhodes Eden Grove Red Lecture Complex.

by Sarah-Jane Bradfield, Rhodes University Website

Prof Mbembe, who was born in the Cameroon, studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and has held appointments at a number of the leading universities in the world, is widely considered to be one of the most significant African academics writing today, along with Mahmood Mamdani and VY Mudimbe.

Democracy as a Community Life

by Achille Mbembe, Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism

What might be the conditions of a radical, future-oriented politics in contemporary South Africa? Interrogating the salience of wealth and property, race and difference as central idioms in the framing and naming of ongoing social struggles, Achille Mbembe investigates the possibility of reimagining democracy not only as a form of human mutuality and freedom, but also as a community of life.

Fanon and the Value of the Human

by Paul Gilroy, Johannesburg Workshop in Theory & Criticism

Why should we care about humanism: rejected as it has been so virulently in the academy and the media, co-opted into the service of western military secularists, while simultaneously being rendered empty and compromised by UNESCO-style liberalism? In order to achieve what Sylvia Wynter calls "humanism's re-enchantment", Paul Gilroy argues for a return to the non-racial, anti-colonial, and ultimately reparative humanism articulated by Franz Fanon - unfashionable though this may be in many contemporary scholastic circles.