Session 1:
“In the Wake…”
Hybrid-Event:
In Person @ Bishop & Wilde at Tin House
Read the Pre-Session Primer
Other Background Readings:
Introduction to Colonialism in Global Perspective by Kris Manjapra
Preface to Toward a Global Idea of Race by Denise Ferreira da Silva
Prologue to Decolonial Ecology by Malcolm Ferdinand
“The Wake” from In the Wake by Christina Sharpe
In the wake of the “non-events” of emancipation and decolonization, Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide have become the primary means and ends of the War on Terra — the unnamable biopolitical and necropolitical war that the forces of colonialism and racial capitalism have waged for nearly six centuries against our planet and her multitudes, with an extreme prejudice against her Black and Indigenous multitudes.
“Global Apartheid” names the inter-national and intra-national racial hierarchies and regimes of organized abandonment that have maintained and advanced the privileges of colonizers and their proxies/redeemers in the wake of the “non-events” of emancipation and decolonization.
“Planetary Ecocide” names the “managed depletion” of the planet’s natural resources by those bent on maximizing the pleasures and profits that they enjoy at the top of the aforementioned inter-national and intra-national racial hierarchies.
The terms “Global Apartheid” and “Planetary Ecocide” do not name well thought out elite conspiracies. Rather to the contrary, they name the accretion of centuries of desperate and hasty marriages of convenience that have enabled colonizers and their proxies/redeemers to maintain and advance privileges to which they are trauma bound: a loose consensus formed around numerous local solutions to cascading social crises — solutions designed to overcome short-term difficulties at the time of their formulation.
This AREA Studies Seminar & Studio (Art, Research, Education, Activism) will invite participants to make plans with one another to deconstruct the administrative statements, technical implements, and built environments that maintain and advance Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide.