HM Online 2020
Programme
Programme

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Edited and Introduced by Juan Grigera and Jeffery R. Webber. Contributors: Ludmila Abilio, Ricardo Antunes, Marcelo Badaró Mattos, Sabrina Fernandes, Rodrigo Nunes, Leda Paulani, and Sean Purdy
On the recent (2018) debate over value theory between David Harvey and his critics
This article was originally published at https://readingsofcapital.com/ [1]
A debate between Mike Haynes and John Marot
Reply to Mike Haynes
How to write with open possibility when one knows the ending?
China Miéville, 2017
(This article is in response to Mike Haynes' article here.)
Introduction
A Forum on the Teachers Rebellion in the United States
A Forum on the Teachers Rebellion in the United States
This article explores a central paradox of contemporary identity-politics: why do we look for recognition from the very institutions we reject as oppressive? The article puts forward the case that neoliberalism’s continued assault on the bases for collectivity has led to a suspicion that ‘the collective’ as an essentialising concept. The assault on the collective coupled with the neoliberal imperative to create an ‘authentic’ self has led to trauma and victimhood becoming the only bases on which people can unite. This manifests discursively and theoretically in the primary trope of contemporary activism: ‘intersectionality’. Mobilising around this analytical concept has led to an analysis of oppression that, even as it claims to be systemic, is totally dematerialised and relentlessly individualised. Instead of building collective power, we are left with a politics of individual demand coming from a coalition of dispersed subject-positions.
Discussions of ‘cultural appropriation’ in popular culture suffer from an inherited politics of authenticity and ownership originating in a liberal legal–ethical framework. Using Raymond Williams’s and Stuart Hall’s cultural theory, this paper pinpoints the place at which cultural-appropriation discourse goes wrong – an essentialist and anti-historical notion of colonial encounters. We can overcome these limits through Marxist cultural and historical analysis. Outrage about colonial violence which most often roots appropriation discourse is better understood within the context of an account of the transition to capitalism beginning with the Low Countries and its eastern colonies. Furthermore, the Marxist idea of the cosmopolitan cultures of both capital and labour offers a productive path for the history of culture rooted in the same colonial encounter.