Lewis Gordon on Disposable Life

Disposable Life - Lewis Gordon from HISTORIES OF VIOLENCE on Vimeo.

How to write about the deaths of people who don’t matter

Sisonke Msimang

Sisonke Msimang, The Daily Maverick

I was asked this week what it takes to tell the stories of black lesbians killed in the townships in South Africa. The answer, in some ways, lies in Ferguson, Missouri, far away from South Africa, in an American community that has been burning all week.

There is much that South African journalists and editors can learn from the coverage of the protests that have arisen in the wake of Michael Brown’s death. Under normal circumstances the shooting death of a black teenager from a segregated community in the Southern state of Missouri would not have garnered much attention nationally, let alone globally. After all, two black men are killed every week by law enforcement officials in the US – most of them unarmed. Indeed, until he died, it is unlikely that Michael Brown mattered much to anyone except those who loved him. In his death he has come to matter a great deal to a great many people in America and beyond.

Six Theses on Waste, Value, and Commons

Vinay Gidwani: Six Theses on Waste, Value, and Commons 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”.