despite his personal proximity to Georges Bataille, jacques lacan makes very few direct reference... more despite his personal proximity to Georges Bataille, jacques lacan makes very few direct references to his work. Indeed, the only mention of Bataille’s name in the 878 pages of the Écrits is in a footnote to “on a Question prior to any possible treatment of psychosis.”1 this article declares that daniel schreber, the prototypical psychotic, was exposed to inner experience by his insight that “God is a whore.”2 lacan affirms that his mention of inner experience is an allusion to Bataille, and refers the reader to Inner Experience, which he calls Bataille’s central work; and to Madame Edwarda, in which “he describes the odd extremity of this experience.”3 lacan here identifies the experience of Madame Edwarda with Bataille’s “inner experience,” and stipulates that both are identical to schreber’s psychotic break.
Michel Foucault was at times critical of the Marxist tradition, and at other times more sympathet... more Michel Foucault was at times critical of the Marxist tradition, and at other times more sympathetic. After his dismissal of Marx in The Order of Things, he conceded the existence of a more compelling, non-humanist version of this discourse. Louis Althusser’s innovations are crucial for the existence of this second Marxism. While consideration of the relation between Foucault and Althusser varies between those who emphasize relations between State and capital, and conversely those who inscribe Marxist considerations into a micro-political account, the distinction between the two thinkers takes place earlier in the development of their respective outlooks. Foucault initially emphasized Marxism as an anthropological eschatology; he revises this argument, commending the possibility of an epistemological mutation of history inherent in Marx’s thought. I locate crucial distinctions between Foucault and Althusser in the early work of the 1960s as inflecting relations in the seemingly ...
Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, 2013
A review of Daniel Morgan, Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema (Berkeley, CA: University ... more A review of Daniel Morgan, Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013).
Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, 2012
Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community, a collection of writings first published in 1985 and ... more Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community, a collection of writings first published in 1985 and 1986, suggests an understanding of community as irreducibly linked to finitude. Alongside this, he advocates a redefinition of the project of revolutionary communism. This endeavor draws equally on the writings on communication of Georges Bataille and the insistence on finitude found in Martin Heidegger. First, we should recapitulate Nancy’s argument in order to determine his presentation of a novel politics as well as the links and disjunctions of his predecessors. More than this, I would like to suggest that a reading of Alphonso Lingis’s The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, published almost a decade later, suggests an intriguing and promising extension or modification of Nancy’s argument. In particular, Lingis suggests an understanding of revolution that appears somewhat closer to the Marxist tradition. I argue that this is partly a result of an inheritance from Emmanuel...
The astonishing events of May-June 2020 have drastically changed our social circumstances and the... more The astonishing events of May-June 2020 have drastically changed our social circumstances and the terms of political discourse. Mass uprisings in every region of the United States and solidarity events around the world present an unprecedented new sequence. The mass media has first made a comparison with the urban unrest of 1968 following the assassination of Martin Luther King. But in these initial stories we can see an attempt to limit perceptions; to speak as if this is simply a reappearance of the past. Other authors have made comparisons to the 1992 events in Los Angeles, when South Central erupted in rage at the police beating of Rodney King. I am going to write about these events, however, in a 21st-century context. We can revisit demonstrations and social movements that took place at the turn of our century, movements that have been repressed and largely forgotten. What we are seeing today is a moment of novelty that requires us to stretch our analytical frames; understandings of past experiences will not provide a reliable guide. However, the memory of earlier struggles brings certain tensions and possibilities into view and might help us to clarify the tenets and methods of an anti-racist perspective.
Comparative Just War Theory: An Introduction to International Perspectives, 2020
Karl Marx argued that the “only justifiable war in history” could be found in the revolutionary c... more Karl Marx argued that the “only justifiable war in history” could be found in the revolutionary conflict of the exploited against their rulers. Accordingly, the Marxist tradition is skeptical of the theory of “just war,” applied to conflicts between states. However, thinkers in this tradition have devoted considerable attention to the problem of revolutionary war, and how it might be best conducted to safeguard and achieve the possibility of socialist transformation. Primary concerns raised by this situation include: 1) the tension between military discipline and egalitarian revolutionary goals; 2) the danger of “substitutionism,” according to which the army will take the place of working-class self-organization; and 3) the variance in possible military strategies, and the need to adopt one that is likely to achieve victories while safeguarding workers’ autonomy. As representative perspectives, it will prove valuable to discuss and compare the views of Vladimir Lenin, a primary leader of the Russian Revolution; Leon Trotsky, a Ukrainian revolutionary and head of the Red Army; and Hugo Blanco, a Peruvian Trotskyist revolutionary who organized rural militias. We discover that Trotsky eventually suggested popular militia as the primary organ of revolutionary war, and that Blanco put this suggestion into further practice. I emphasize the Trotskyist tradition, in contrast to other military traditions that have claimed Marxist justification, because the popular militia is more clearly a direct instrument of the emancipation of working people, without a command structure making decisions on their behalf. This militia is the instrument of mass political development; democratically accountable and in service of liberation from class domination and national oppression. The Marxist conception provides criteria for military conflict that subordinates immediate ends to emancipatory ends, providing the possible route to the extinction of war itself.
It may be warranted to describe Marcos and the Zapatistas (non-pejoratively) as “crypto-Marxist.”... more It may be warranted to describe Marcos and the Zapatistas (non-pejoratively) as “crypto-Marxist.” There is no evidence to suggest that Marcos or any other leader of the movement has carefully examined the work of Trotsky. Marcos’s understanding of politics seems to have emerged from the more well-known guerrilla strategists, including Che Guevara and the Nicaraguan and El Salvadoran revolutionary movements he inspired. However, over ten years of practice, Marcos was led to abandon foquismo, as well as the protracted war strategy imported to Mesoamerica from Chinese and Vietnamese sources. Instead, after becoming rooted in indigenous communities, the Zapatistas began to develop a popular army of self-defense as an instrument of rural communes. In this regard, independently, the Zapatistas developed a popular militia that is very similar to the force previously advocated by Hugo Blanco.
In the 1970s, activists and intellectuals developed new modes of inquiry for understanding the ad... more In the 1970s, activists and intellectuals developed new modes of inquiry for understanding the administration, control, and punishment of human bodies, and the constitutive effects that these techniques had on our means of apprehending ourselves and communicating with others. While Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics is a particularly celebrated example, his innovations occurred in parallel with another endeavor, initiated independently of him: The practical and theoretical efforts of autonomist feminists, first in Italy. Beginning with a new approach to the study of domestic labor and the nature of the value that it produces, these thinkers developed increasingly far-reaching approaches to problems of racism, colonial and post-colonial subjugation, and ecological despoliation, as well as the subordination of women. Anticipating a series of other developments in feminism and queer theory, the autonomist feminists – Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Leopoldina Fortunati, Maria Mies, and Silvia Federici, among others – developed sophisticated formulations of compulsory heterosexuality, sexual commodification, rape culture, and the reciprocal bonds between class and gender. Moreover, the structural and even totalizing approach that these authors produced has a great deal to offer us today, because it carefully elaborates a common horizon of struggle on which solidarity can be built.
Multiculturalism and Oppression: The Marxist Perspectives of Fraser, Lenin and Fanon Drawing on N... more Multiculturalism and Oppression: The Marxist Perspectives of Fraser, Lenin and Fanon Drawing on Nancy Fraser's critique of mainstream multiculturalism, this essay draws out an approach rooted in the distinctive revolutionary Marxist tradition. It is first worth revisiting Fraser's insights regarding the shortcomings of the programs offered by liberal welfare state; as well as her identification of the tendency to reify difference, evident in many of the civic and social proposals to redress prejudice on the basis of race, gender, and sexuality. However, we can also identify a consistently Marxist approach to these questions that precedes Fraser's intervention. I draw this out by means of engagement with the history of Marxist positions on the national question, as presented in particular by V.I. Lenin, and the decolonizing and anti-racist practice of subsequent Marxist figures. In particular, I emphasize the work of a heterodox Marxist, Frantz Fanon, in extending the tradition's relevance to questions of cultural oppression.
Studies in Social and Political Thought volume 20, winter 2012
Leftists have often received the ethical phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas with suspicion, on the... more Leftists have often received the ethical phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas with suspicion, on the grounds that it seems to lack a political appreciation of exploitation. While Levinas’s thought includes strong considerations of cultural particularity, his ethics also emphasizes responsibility to the physical suffering of the oppressed. A reading of Derrida’s approach to the political applications of Levinas’s thought reveals broader significance to elements of Levinas’s messianism than his Zionism first suggests. Building on this deconstructive reading, the respective works of Alphonso Lingis and Enrique Dussel emerge as new investigations of the political importance of Levinasan ethics to contemporary socialism.
despite his personal proximity to Georges Bataille, jacques lacan makes very few direct reference... more despite his personal proximity to Georges Bataille, jacques lacan makes very few direct references to his work. Indeed, the only mention of Bataille’s name in the 878 pages of the Écrits is in a footnote to “on a Question prior to any possible treatment of psychosis.”1 this article declares that daniel schreber, the prototypical psychotic, was exposed to inner experience by his insight that “God is a whore.”2 lacan affirms that his mention of inner experience is an allusion to Bataille, and refers the reader to Inner Experience, which he calls Bataille’s central work; and to Madame Edwarda, in which “he describes the odd extremity of this experience.”3 lacan here identifies the experience of Madame Edwarda with Bataille’s “inner experience,” and stipulates that both are identical to schreber’s psychotic break.
Michel Foucault was at times critical of the Marxist tradition, and at other times more sympathet... more Michel Foucault was at times critical of the Marxist tradition, and at other times more sympathetic. After his dismissal of Marx in The Order of Things, he conceded the existence of a more compelling, non-humanist version of this discourse. Louis Althusser’s innovations are crucial for the existence of this second Marxism. While consideration of the relation between Foucault and Althusser varies between those who emphasize relations between State and capital, and conversely those who inscribe Marxist considerations into a micro-political account, the distinction between the two thinkers takes place earlier in the development of their respective outlooks. Foucault initially emphasized Marxism as an anthropological eschatology; he revises this argument, commending the possibility of an epistemological mutation of history inherent in Marx’s thought. I locate crucial distinctions between Foucault and Althusser in the early work of the 1960s as inflecting relations in the seemingly ...
Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, 2013
A review of Daniel Morgan, Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema (Berkeley, CA: University ... more A review of Daniel Morgan, Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013).
Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, 2012
Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community, a collection of writings first published in 1985 and ... more Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community, a collection of writings first published in 1985 and 1986, suggests an understanding of community as irreducibly linked to finitude. Alongside this, he advocates a redefinition of the project of revolutionary communism. This endeavor draws equally on the writings on communication of Georges Bataille and the insistence on finitude found in Martin Heidegger. First, we should recapitulate Nancy’s argument in order to determine his presentation of a novel politics as well as the links and disjunctions of his predecessors. More than this, I would like to suggest that a reading of Alphonso Lingis’s The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, published almost a decade later, suggests an intriguing and promising extension or modification of Nancy’s argument. In particular, Lingis suggests an understanding of revolution that appears somewhat closer to the Marxist tradition. I argue that this is partly a result of an inheritance from Emmanuel...
The astonishing events of May-June 2020 have drastically changed our social circumstances and the... more The astonishing events of May-June 2020 have drastically changed our social circumstances and the terms of political discourse. Mass uprisings in every region of the United States and solidarity events around the world present an unprecedented new sequence. The mass media has first made a comparison with the urban unrest of 1968 following the assassination of Martin Luther King. But in these initial stories we can see an attempt to limit perceptions; to speak as if this is simply a reappearance of the past. Other authors have made comparisons to the 1992 events in Los Angeles, when South Central erupted in rage at the police beating of Rodney King. I am going to write about these events, however, in a 21st-century context. We can revisit demonstrations and social movements that took place at the turn of our century, movements that have been repressed and largely forgotten. What we are seeing today is a moment of novelty that requires us to stretch our analytical frames; understandings of past experiences will not provide a reliable guide. However, the memory of earlier struggles brings certain tensions and possibilities into view and might help us to clarify the tenets and methods of an anti-racist perspective.
Comparative Just War Theory: An Introduction to International Perspectives, 2020
Karl Marx argued that the “only justifiable war in history” could be found in the revolutionary c... more Karl Marx argued that the “only justifiable war in history” could be found in the revolutionary conflict of the exploited against their rulers. Accordingly, the Marxist tradition is skeptical of the theory of “just war,” applied to conflicts between states. However, thinkers in this tradition have devoted considerable attention to the problem of revolutionary war, and how it might be best conducted to safeguard and achieve the possibility of socialist transformation. Primary concerns raised by this situation include: 1) the tension between military discipline and egalitarian revolutionary goals; 2) the danger of “substitutionism,” according to which the army will take the place of working-class self-organization; and 3) the variance in possible military strategies, and the need to adopt one that is likely to achieve victories while safeguarding workers’ autonomy. As representative perspectives, it will prove valuable to discuss and compare the views of Vladimir Lenin, a primary leader of the Russian Revolution; Leon Trotsky, a Ukrainian revolutionary and head of the Red Army; and Hugo Blanco, a Peruvian Trotskyist revolutionary who organized rural militias. We discover that Trotsky eventually suggested popular militia as the primary organ of revolutionary war, and that Blanco put this suggestion into further practice. I emphasize the Trotskyist tradition, in contrast to other military traditions that have claimed Marxist justification, because the popular militia is more clearly a direct instrument of the emancipation of working people, without a command structure making decisions on their behalf. This militia is the instrument of mass political development; democratically accountable and in service of liberation from class domination and national oppression. The Marxist conception provides criteria for military conflict that subordinates immediate ends to emancipatory ends, providing the possible route to the extinction of war itself.
It may be warranted to describe Marcos and the Zapatistas (non-pejoratively) as “crypto-Marxist.”... more It may be warranted to describe Marcos and the Zapatistas (non-pejoratively) as “crypto-Marxist.” There is no evidence to suggest that Marcos or any other leader of the movement has carefully examined the work of Trotsky. Marcos’s understanding of politics seems to have emerged from the more well-known guerrilla strategists, including Che Guevara and the Nicaraguan and El Salvadoran revolutionary movements he inspired. However, over ten years of practice, Marcos was led to abandon foquismo, as well as the protracted war strategy imported to Mesoamerica from Chinese and Vietnamese sources. Instead, after becoming rooted in indigenous communities, the Zapatistas began to develop a popular army of self-defense as an instrument of rural communes. In this regard, independently, the Zapatistas developed a popular militia that is very similar to the force previously advocated by Hugo Blanco.
In the 1970s, activists and intellectuals developed new modes of inquiry for understanding the ad... more In the 1970s, activists and intellectuals developed new modes of inquiry for understanding the administration, control, and punishment of human bodies, and the constitutive effects that these techniques had on our means of apprehending ourselves and communicating with others. While Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics is a particularly celebrated example, his innovations occurred in parallel with another endeavor, initiated independently of him: The practical and theoretical efforts of autonomist feminists, first in Italy. Beginning with a new approach to the study of domestic labor and the nature of the value that it produces, these thinkers developed increasingly far-reaching approaches to problems of racism, colonial and post-colonial subjugation, and ecological despoliation, as well as the subordination of women. Anticipating a series of other developments in feminism and queer theory, the autonomist feminists – Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Leopoldina Fortunati, Maria Mies, and Silvia Federici, among others – developed sophisticated formulations of compulsory heterosexuality, sexual commodification, rape culture, and the reciprocal bonds between class and gender. Moreover, the structural and even totalizing approach that these authors produced has a great deal to offer us today, because it carefully elaborates a common horizon of struggle on which solidarity can be built.
Multiculturalism and Oppression: The Marxist Perspectives of Fraser, Lenin and Fanon Drawing on N... more Multiculturalism and Oppression: The Marxist Perspectives of Fraser, Lenin and Fanon Drawing on Nancy Fraser's critique of mainstream multiculturalism, this essay draws out an approach rooted in the distinctive revolutionary Marxist tradition. It is first worth revisiting Fraser's insights regarding the shortcomings of the programs offered by liberal welfare state; as well as her identification of the tendency to reify difference, evident in many of the civic and social proposals to redress prejudice on the basis of race, gender, and sexuality. However, we can also identify a consistently Marxist approach to these questions that precedes Fraser's intervention. I draw this out by means of engagement with the history of Marxist positions on the national question, as presented in particular by V.I. Lenin, and the decolonizing and anti-racist practice of subsequent Marxist figures. In particular, I emphasize the work of a heterodox Marxist, Frantz Fanon, in extending the tradition's relevance to questions of cultural oppression.
Studies in Social and Political Thought volume 20, winter 2012
Leftists have often received the ethical phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas with suspicion, on the... more Leftists have often received the ethical phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas with suspicion, on the grounds that it seems to lack a political appreciation of exploitation. While Levinas’s thought includes strong considerations of cultural particularity, his ethics also emphasizes responsibility to the physical suffering of the oppressed. A reading of Derrida’s approach to the political applications of Levinas’s thought reveals broader significance to elements of Levinas’s messianism than his Zionism first suggests. Building on this deconstructive reading, the respective works of Alphonso Lingis and Enrique Dussel emerge as new investigations of the political importance of Levinasan ethics to contemporary socialism.
Translation of an article by Daniel Bensaïd, a French Trotskyist, about the congress of Lotta Con... more Translation of an article by Daniel Bensaïd, a French Trotskyist, about the congress of Lotta Continua, an Italian revolutionary group of the 1970s. Bensaïd describes their positions and gives a detailed assessment.
A translation of an essay by a French Trotskyist, Daniel Bensaïd, about the Nicaraguan Revolution... more A translation of an essay by a French Trotskyist, Daniel Bensaïd, about the Nicaraguan Revolution of 1979. Bensaïd compares the revolutionary dynamics of the classic Russian Revolution of 1917, and makes recommendations about how the Sandinista National Liberation Front can make the revolution permanent.
Lise Vogel's study, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Towards a Unitary Theory, argues that ma... more Lise Vogel's study, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Towards a Unitary Theory, argues that many socialist feminists relied on a dual-systems theory that maintains patriarchy and chauvinism as separate forms of cultural determination, without integrating them into the social totality of capitalist production and exploitation. Vogel's insight draws on earlier innovations in the Marxist tradition, most explicitly that of Louis Althusser. She argues that Althusser allowed her to break from an empirically descriptive approach to domestic labor, because his separation of Marx's conceptual insights from his empirical illustrations helped her to understand reproduction's integral role within capitalism. However, Vogel's work is also comparable to Althusser's later work on ideology. He argues that the reproduction of the conditions of production is equally important as production itself, and that ideology maintains this reproductive necessity. While he names the family as a primary apparatus of ideology, he does not dwell on its role. Nonetheless, we can see an alternative framework of social reproduction, through further engagement with the feminist reading of Althusser developed by Judith Butler. However, as Nancy Fraser points out, this risks an excessively immediate understanding of the relationship between gender ideology and the mode of production. Renewed attention to Vogel can change the way that we read the Althusserian intervention, such that social reproduction can be understood more clearly. I argue for a new conversation between social reproduction theory and queer theory, mediated by a shared inheritance from Althusser. Butler's reading contributes a theory of ideology that richly describes the experience of gender identity, while Vogel provides a more rigorous grounding in historical materialism.
First published in 1983, Lise Vogel’s study, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Towards a Unita... more First published in 1983, Lise Vogel’s study, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Towards a Unitary Theory, has received renewed attention since its republication last year. Vogel makes a compelling argument that many socialist feminists relied on a dual-systems theory that maintains patriarchy and chauvinism as separate instances of cultural determination, without integrating them into the social totality of capitalist production and exploitation. I argue that Vogel’s work finds a complement in earlier analyses written by the Italian autonomist feminists, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Leopoldina Fortunati. However, Vogel’s notion of value creation maintains a more traditional perspective. While she subscribes to Louis Althusser’s epistemological concepts, the Italians follow a reformulation according to the viewpoint of the worker’s experience and the notion of the “social factory”, advocated by Mario Tronti. While autonomist feminism and social reproduction theory share a commitment to understanding reproductive labor – including housework and care labor – as indispensable elements of the mode of production, they also depart from one another on questions of interpretation and practice, particularly regarding the application of the wage relation to domestic labor.
Materialism can be associated with grounding principles from which ideas proceed. In contrast to ... more Materialism can be associated with grounding principles from which ideas proceed. In contrast to this, materiality has been offered as disruptive to meaning, for example in the writings of Georges Bataille. Tracing this conception of materiality into the work of Derrida and de Man reveals distinct revisitings of Marx with consequences for politics and ethics. De Man’s approach to The German Ideology re-establishes ideology as naturalization, to which he opposes a critique revealing rhetorical construction; Laclau explores more practical political possibilities from this insight. Derrida, in contrast, emphasizes an ethical dimension to the materialist opposition to ideology. Deconstructive materiality reveals itself to be profoundly concerned with the theme of experience. Heidegger’s description of experience as relying on metaphysical presuppositions gives way to an alternative conception according to which subjectivity is opened to material excess. Materiality, ethics, politics, deconstruction, and experience co-implicate one another.
Isabelle Garo's study, Foucault, Deleuze, Althusser et Marx : La politique dans la philosophie, p... more Isabelle Garo's study, Foucault, Deleuze, Althusser et Marx : La politique dans la philosophie, presents a historical approach to the French philosophy of the 1960s and 1970s and its relationship to Marx and the Marxist tradition. In her view, these authors were captured by a largely mistaken understanding of the resources present in Marxist thought, and were overly affected by the prejudices instilled by the French Communist Party. Speaking from a perspective of practical commitment, she traces a path from early French Marxism to an antitotalitarian consensus. Her study renders Louis Althusser's innovations the most pivotal in introducing a whole series of themes, with ambivalent effects on theoretical production today. Most significantly, she discerns a replacement of politics and political economy by philosophy and epistemology. She attends first to the mobilization of psychoanalysis against humanism, which gave way to a vehement critique of the normative aspects of psychoanalysis itself. Re-reading Foucault and Deleuze as post
Review of Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, by Steve... more Review of Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, by Steve Wright
Gloria Anzaldúa’s writings on Chicana experience have become widely read and influential, often a... more Gloria Anzaldúa’s writings on Chicana experience have become widely read and influential, often associated with the paradigm of intersectionality. However, Anzaldúa’s approach is deeply enmeshed in a consideration of the ecological dimension of Indigenous thought. Anzaldúa reconsiders the non- human and the ecological as crucial elements of practical consciousness, and draws on anti-patriarchal Nahuatl traditions in order to express this awareness. For Anzaldúa, Indigenous philosophy contributes a critique of anthropocentrism – the Western elevation of man over nature. She retrieves Nahuatl concepts, such as "nepantla," in order to describe new varieties of experience that draw from the natural world, particularly the example of animals. Further, Anzaldúa criticizes the Aztec imperial form of Indigenous philosophy from a feminist and democratic viewpoint, drawing out potential for liberation outside the most dominant traditions of pre-conquest Mexico.
In the United States, Christianity and Darwinism are among the major paradigms of social thought.... more In the United States, Christianity and Darwinism are among the major paradigms of social thought. It is possible to see a dividing line between them, in which people choose one or the other and find a whole series of other perspectives engendered by these totalizing worldviews. I’m going to suggest that both of these perspectives are widely misunderstood, in their fundamental principles and ethical implications. In my view, the two perspectives actually enrich one another, and in this conviction I’m aligned with a number of contemporary theologians from Latin America. I’m particularly going to address the perspective of a Nicaraguan Catholic poet, Ernesto Cardenal, and a French precursor who helped inspire his thought, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
Uploads
Papers by Andrew Ryder
The mass media has first made a comparison with the urban unrest of 1968 following the assassination of Martin Luther King. But in these initial stories we can see an attempt to limit perceptions; to speak as if this is simply a reappearance of the past. Other authors have made comparisons to the 1992 events in Los Angeles, when South Central erupted in rage at the police beating of Rodney King. I am going to write about these events, however, in a 21st-century context. We can revisit demonstrations and social movements that took place at the turn of our century, movements that have been repressed and largely forgotten. What we are seeing today is a moment of novelty that requires us to stretch our analytical frames; understandings of past experiences will not provide a reliable guide. However, the memory of earlier struggles brings certain tensions and possibilities into view and might help us to clarify the tenets and methods of an anti-racist perspective.
The mass media has first made a comparison with the urban unrest of 1968 following the assassination of Martin Luther King. But in these initial stories we can see an attempt to limit perceptions; to speak as if this is simply a reappearance of the past. Other authors have made comparisons to the 1992 events in Los Angeles, when South Central erupted in rage at the police beating of Rodney King. I am going to write about these events, however, in a 21st-century context. We can revisit demonstrations and social movements that took place at the turn of our century, movements that have been repressed and largely forgotten. What we are seeing today is a moment of novelty that requires us to stretch our analytical frames; understandings of past experiences will not provide a reliable guide. However, the memory of earlier struggles brings certain tensions and possibilities into view and might help us to clarify the tenets and methods of an anti-racist perspective.