In recent years, scholars and activists have brought renewed attention to W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of abolition democracy. Initially coined in Black Reconstruction (1935), to describe both a political movement and a democratic ideal, abolition democracy has been taken up theoretically by Angela Davis, Allegra McLeod, and others to describe the ongoing process of dismantling global capitalism’s political, racial, gender, and economic hierarchies, alongside the simultaneous creation of reconstructed social relations, institutions, and practices governed by universal democratic participation, instead of by force. This article suggests that Du Bois continues to draw on abolition democracy as a conceptual framework in his post-Black Reconstruction work. Tracing the outlines of this framework in his unpublished manuscript A World Search for Democracy, I demonstrate how for Du Bois, the question of democracy remains fundamentally tied to the ongoing legacies of slavery. As he continues to draw on the Reconstruction era as an historical example, Du Bois gives further shape to the idea of abolition as a process in the present (rather than an event in the past). In doing so, he recuperates the unfulfilled promise of abolition democracy as a theoretical and practical model for considering alternatives modes of citizenship beyond the material, ideal, and embodied limits of liberal bourgeois democracy. Accordingly, I argue, in World Search, we can see the outlines of abolition democracy as a three-fold project: political-economic, epistemic, and affective. Each section of this article sheds light on one of these dimensions, drawing on theoretical models from Nancy Fraser, Sylvia Wynter, Sara Ahmed, and Dylan Rodríguez. By thus abstracting the concept of abolition democracy further from the historical movement analyzed in Black Reconstruction, I propose that Du Bois’s World Search offers lessons that can inform abolitionist theory and praxis today.
Keyword: fascism
Feelings, Fascism, and Futures
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed some of the most glaring inequalities within nations and across the globe. While the disruption caused by the pandemic has given rise to hopes for a cultural reset to address these structures of inequality—captured compellingly by Arundhati Roy in her vision of the pandemic as a portal—the sediments of inequality have proven hard to erode. In this contribution, I explore this regressive impulse by honing in on the affect of restraint. While restraint is not ordinarily characterized as such, in the pandemic it has been a defining feature of our lives. However, it was not afforded equally. I begin by showing how restraint has become racialized, serving as a political tool to suppress protests, notably Black Lives Matter. I then move to show how globally, too, there has been an imbalance in who is—and what countries are—expected to practice nonintervention, linking both domestic and international uses of restraint to these preexisting structures of inequality. I end by proffering a vision for how, despite all these obstacles, the pandemic has also offered ways to bypass the state and form new social formations.
Manifestations of Microfascism in Spatial Dimensions: A Study on Mumbai’s Public Spaces
Mumbai has an identity that is built around its multicultural, multi-ethnic population, with an enterprising community that prides itself on its resilient spirit. The pluralism that marks the city’s social spaces remained powerful for decades resulting in an immigrant population from all over the country finding its home in this city. When Bombay was renamed Mumbai, it was also a reflection of the altered social sensibilities and the manifestation of an exclusionary politics which began to get reflected in the public spaces of Mumbai. Post globalization and economic liberalization, a hegemonic shift in power centers brought about further negotiations with identities and social spaces, with the new cityscape evolving steadily. The pervasive presence of the politics of othering that marks the contemporary Indian political sphere has its presence felt in Mumbai’s public spaces. The rapid gentrification and erasure of the poor from the public spaces, the expanding privately-owned public spaces and the social interactions that mark the new global city of Mumbai unfold the hegemonic power relations of the new India. This article attempts to imagine the new social narratives and cartographies within the theoretical framework of microfascism as elaborated by Deleuze and Guattari. Mumbai’s public spaces are closely observed and analyzed to comprehend the new dynamics of power at work and its political and social ramifications in relation to the rest of the nation. This paper also seeks to look at the patterns of dissent evolving out of the microfascist spaces of Mumbai.
Review of The Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics and Cultural Labor After the Avant-Garde by Stevphen Shukaitis (Rowman & Littlefield International)
Stevphen Shukaitis has produced an interesting text by situating a strategic conversation between artistic avant-gardes and autonomist political movements. He begins with a plea for rethinking strategy, and not just questions of tactics, in seeking radical aesthetic and socio-political change.