Empire uses institutional violence to surveil, administer, and control lives, often through bureaucratic means that appear neutral. Policies and procedures identify and suppress potential rebels, policing livelihoods in insidious ways. Drawing on Kris Manjapra’s Colonialism in Global Perspective and Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics, this session will examine how these systems operate and how we might elude their control.

Through cultural violence, Empire obscures realities and mystifies histories of resistance, distorting narratives to suppress rebellion. This session will uncover the role of culture in perpetuating oppression, with guidance from texts like Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Rizvana Bradley’s Anteaesthetics. How can counter-cultural modes of knowledge production and wisdom keeping disrupt these distortions?

Empire relies on physical violence to maintain control, deploying militarized force to threaten, brutalize, and kill rebels while flattening sites of rebellion. This session will explore the history and persistence of militarized repression, drawing on texts like Frantz Fanon’s On Violence and Julian Go’s Policing Empires. Together, we will strategize ways to confront and defend ourselves against such brutality.

In our time, in the era of Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide, what are the freedoms that are denied to peoples by colonialism and racial capitalism? Ay, and how can we form communities that can function as trellises that enable the most abject victims of colonization and racialization to reach those freedoms?

What do we mean by the term community? What makes community for us? Who are we? What makes us?

In curious and troubling ways, we have spent much of our time talking about our responsibilities with regard to our world as if they were individual responsibilities and not responsibilities that are bound with others who are not of our own generation, with our elders and our juniors, with our dead ancestors and our yet-to-be-born descendants.

This lecture will re-articulate the schism between the continental and the diasporic Africanity/Blackness as an evolving object of philosophical study by re-appropriating and re-evaluating the psychoanalytic anthropologies and ethnographies that informed Deleuze and Guattari’s Schizoanalysis, re-reading them alongside the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Franz Fanon, Alfâ Ibrâhîm Sow, George Jackson, Hortense Spillers, Achille Mbembe, Saidiya Hartman, R.A. Judy, Fred Moten, and Denise Ferreira da Silva. In so doing, this lecture will make the case for an Afro-Schizoanalytics and an Anti-Oedipal Blackness that runs counter to applications of Western psychoanalytics and schizoanalytics to anthropologies of continental and diasporic Black Africans.

Those who identify with the forces of Empire are obsessed with home security: securing a home and securing the comforts of home from the surround. Organized against the forces of Empire, those who identify as or with Maroons make themselves at home in the surround.

The agents of Empire would have us believe the lie that it is imperative for us to feed more precise data into our machines and models in order to more accurately predict favorable and unfavorable outcomes.

The truth of the matter is that our choices regarding what to measure, when and where to measure, and how precisely to measure are often responsible for prematurely or belatedly resolving outcomes in favorable or unfavorable ways.

At minimum, countering Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide means two things. First, it means (re-)constructing and maintaining convivial infrastructures that would enable the migration of peoples from the Grey Zone to the Green Zone in defiance of colonial bordering regimes. On the other hand, it means sabotaging and abolishing the colonial infrastructures that are employed by the Green Zone to extract, extort, and exploit land, labor, matter, energy from the Grey Zone.

“Maroon Infrastructures” are assemblages of administrative statements, technical implements, built environments, and dramatic elements that enable us to engage in direct actions to abolish the impositions of the border, the the police, and the prison.

Looking at the matter from one side, the task is to deconstruct the “Ordered World” — the colonial world with its determinate demographics, separable geographic locales, and historiographic eventualities.

Looking at the matter from another side, the task (re-)construct an “Entangled World” — a convivial world characterized by demographic indeterminacies, geographic non-localities, and historigraphic non-eventualities.

It all clicked for us with a quote from Bertolt Brecht, “We often speak of the violence of a river overflowing but less of the violence of the banks that confine it.”

Consider, for instance, the Grand Canyon, whose natural, yielding banks have given way to the flow of the Colorado River over the course of millennia, and contrast that with the Old River Control Structures engineered along the Mississippi River, violently keeping that great river in check, at least until the great river finally rages against with enough force to violently wreck its engineering.

Borrowing terms from the conduct of due process in pursuit of justice, I proposed that we might come together to learn (i) to bear witness to the disturbing realities of colonization and its wake/fallout, (ii) to testify to the disturbing realities, and (iii) to contribute to the repair of that which has been disturbed by colonization and its wake/fallout.

But as we unpacked these terms — witness, testify, and repair — we realized that these terms, in their conventional senses, proved untenable and that we either had to make new sense of these terms or discover better ones.

Marking the distinction between (i) an ideology, (ii) a process, (iii) the product of a process, and (iv) the wake of a process.

Çacatzin of The Fyrthyr Institute will join artists Che Yeh and Patte Loper in the final event of the Interstitial Lives series to discuss worldbuilding practices and interspecies relationships within artwork and the artistic community building.