Occupying Space: The Battle for Politics

Helena Chávez Mac Gregor, Johannesburg Workshop in Theory & Criticism

For more than a decade, the construction of politics has been determined within the logic of exception and sovereignty. Although at the end of the twentieth century the Balkan conflict already heralded a logic of war, following September 11th, the early 2000s were marked by terror, creating a foundation where, following the proposals of Carl Schmitt, the specific difference from which to determine the political was to be found once more in the figure of the enemy.

Footnotes on the off-shore city

Achille Mbembe, Johannesburg Workshop in Theory & Criticism

 

At the start of the 21st century, we witness a renewed interest in the idea of the African future. Gradually, older senses of time and space based on linear notions of development and progress are being replaced by newer senses of time founded on liquidity and flows. Africa's future is increasingly thought of as open, full of possibility and potentiality, even as pliant. This new cultural and political sense of time is constructed in a number of registers, from the economic to the fictional. It acknowledges that things are complex. And yet, in its emphasis on un-actualized possibilities and would-be worlds, it also relies on open narrative models. Critical in this regard is the study of emergent orders, forms of self-organization, small ruptures, "tipping points" that may lead to deep alterations of the direction the Continent takes.

"My Political Life Has Been Informed by the Struggle in South Africa" - Angela Davis

Johannesburg Workshop on Theory & Criticism

Ainehi Edoro:  60 intellectuals. One bus. 47 hours of road time. And the theme: "The Archives of the Non-Racial." What is your sense of what this intellectual project is about?

Angela Davis: The project is informed by place and space. This was the attraction for me---our movement from Johannesburg to Swaziland to the Eastern Cape to the Western Cape. I have visited South Africa on three other occasions, but this is the first that I’ve been able to acquire a real sense of space. Of course, it also has to do with the kinds of conversations that have been happening around the question of race and political struggle. I was primarily interested in this project because most of my political life, which is most of my life, has been informed by the struggle in South Africa.

Siliva Federici's new book launched in Johannesburg

WiSER and JWTC invite you to the Launch of a new Book by Silvia Federici

Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

Written between 1975 and the present, the essays collected in this volume represent thirty years of research and theorizing on questions of social reproduction and the transformations which the globalization process has produced. Originally inspired by Federici’s organizational work in the Wages For Housework movement, topics discussed include the international restructuring of reproductive work and its effects on the sexual division of labor, the globalization of care work and sex work, the crisis of elder care, and the development of affective labor. Though theoretical in style, the book is written in an explanatory manner that makes it both accessible to a broad public and ideal for classroom use.

Speakers: Catherine Burns (WiSER) and Sharad Chari (CISA)
Tuesday, 17^th September 2013 6pm

JWTC: Jean and John Comaroff on 'Theory from the South'

The Johannesburg Workshop on Theory & Criticism 

For Jean and John Comaroff, understanding these times, accounting for their lineaments, finally, is the point, the provocation, the critical pulse that underlies both the poetics and the disciplinary practice toward which Theory From the South aspires. Whether it succeeds or fails, or does both in some proportion, the issues that it was written to address remain too important to ignore, too serious to set aside, too weighty to wait.

Theory - north south and between

Kerry Chance, from Harvard University, attended the 2012 Session of the JWTC. She speaks to The Blog.
 

What in your view distinguishes ‘theory’ from Harvard and ‘theory’ from Johannesburg?

As I understand it, the proposition of the Johannesburg Workshop, among other things, is to read and produce contemporary theory from ‘the South,’ and thereby also to make visible the potential parochialisms of ‘the North.’ Having lived and worked in South Africa for over a decade, my approach to theory has been profoundly shaped by life and thought emanating from here. As anthropologists and scholars of Post-colonial and African Studies have argued for some time, our vantage in the world has a bearing on the kinds of questions we ask of theory, and how we think theory vis-à-vis the Western canon. So, while it is important not to lose sight of this proposition, the lines between ‘North’ and ‘South’ often are not so easily drawn. With regard to recent housing evictions in Johannesburg and Chicago, for instance, we might see more connections between Soweto and Chicago’s Cabrini Green than Sandton or Chicago’s Northside. In other words, we should not overlook emerging global relations and processes that suggest how ‘North’ and ‘South’ can be seen as multiple and beyond any simple dichotomy. In this vein, having spent the last year at Harvard, I can say that it is a place where African Studies is being taken seriously. There also are many academics, students, research projects, initiatives and student organizations that are ‘thinking from the South’ in important ways.

Southern Theory | Global Humanities -- A Lecture Series on Frantz Fanon

WISER

After a thousand years of world ascendency, the Euro-American archive might finally be running dry.  Meanwhile, not only is the world moving South and East, but so is theory.  The redrawing of the global intellectual map which started during the era of decolonization is proceeding unabated.  The worldwide dissemination of thought is buttressed by a worldwide circulation and translation of texts, a highly productive invention and re-appropriation of concepts and the de-nationalization of the great academic debates. Under what conditions can the de-nationalization of the humanities bring a truly global perspective to conventional theory and criticism and rekindle our research imagination?

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.

The Revolutions by Ordinary People

by Raúl Zibechi (Translated by Cristina Cielo), Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism

 First published in La Jornada, 03 June 2011
as "Las revoluciones de la gente común".

In the most diverse corners of the planet, ordinary people are coming out onto the streets, occupying plazas, meeting up with other ordinary people who they did not know but who they immediately recognize. None of them waited to be convened, they were driven by the need to discover themselves. They do not calculate the consequences of their acts, they act based on what they feel, desire and dream. We find ourselves faced with real revolutions, profound changes and paradigmatic shifts, even if those in power believe that all will return to "normal" once the plazas and streets are cleared.

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.