#Brenna Bhandar

[endlessandrea]

"So the concept of “prison abolition” doesn’t simply mean abolishing prisons, but means working and struggling for a transformation of society as the groundwork necessary to work toward the abolition of prisons. Angela Y. Davis is author of a book called Are Prisons Obsolete? [12] Prisons are obsolete in the sense that the massive expansion of incarceration has clearly not dealt with the ostensible social ills imprisonment is supposed to ameliorate, and prison abolitionists have worked tirelessly to denaturalize the prison and incarceration as inevitabilities. Abolition is about breaking down and getting rid of the political and economic conditions that make the current prison system viable, and that is what it means to “make prisons obsolete.” If we think about property abolition, it requires us to think about what a world beyond the norms, structures, and psychic-symbolic centrality of private ownership might look like, and what the preconditions for such a shift might be. What I’ve learned through a recently completed project, a book of interviews titled Revolutionary Feminisms, [13] is that abolition work begins with centering and recognizing the transformative work, a work of survival really, that exists around us, has always existed, and upon which we must build. "

[rotenotes]

Brenna Bhandar - Ατιμωρησία σε καιρούς γενοκτονίας

Brenna Bhandar – Ατιμωρησία σε καιρούς γενοκτονίας Μετάφραση του: Impunity in times of genocide by Brenna Bhandar Brenna Bhandar, ‘Impunity in times of genocide’, Radical Philosophy 217, Winter 2024, pp. 3–9. Η Brenna Bhandar είναι μέλος της συντακτικής ομάδας του Radical Philosophy. Ατιμωρησία σε καιρούς γενοκτονίας Brenna Bhandar Για περισσότερο από ένα χρόνο, ο κόσμος έχει στρατολογηθεί…

[opstandelse]

Brenna Bhandar - Ατιμωρησία σε καιρούς γενοκτονίας

Brenna Bhandar – Ατιμωρησία σε καιρούς γενοκτονίας Μετάφραση του: Impunity in times of genocide by Brenna Bhandar Brenna Bhandar, ‘Impunity in times of genocide’, Radical Philosophy 217, Winter 2024, pp. 3–9. Η Brenna Bhandar είναι μέλος της συντακτικής ομάδας του Radical Philosophy. Ατιμωρησία σε καιρούς γενοκτονίας Brenna Bhandar Για περισσότερο από ένα χρόνο, ο κόσμος έχει στρατολογηθεί…

[fatehbaz]

[C]oncentration of global wealth and the "extension of hopeless poverties"; [...] the intensification of state repression and the growth of police states; the stratification of peoples [...]; and the production of surplus populations, such as the landless, the homeless, and the imprisoned, who are treated as social "waste." [...] To be unable to transcend [...] the horror [...] of such a world order is what hell means [...]. Without a glimpse of an elsewhere or an otherwise, we’re living in hell. [...] [P]eople [...] are very publicly and very personally rejecting prison as the ideal model of social order. [...] [I]nstincts and impulses are always contained by a system which dominates us so thoroughly that it decides when we can “have an impact” on “restructuring the world,” which is always relegated to the future. [...] Cultivating an instinctual basis for freedom is about identifying the longings that already exist - however muted or marginal [...]. The utopian is not only or merely a "fantasy of" and for "the future [...]." The utopian is a way of conceiving and living in the here and now [...]. [W]e’ve already begun to realize it. Begun to realize it in those scandalous moments when the present wavers [...].

Text by: Avery F. Gordon. “Some Thoughts on the Utopian.” Anthropology & Materialism [Online]. 3. November 2016.

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Something must be done [...]. Haunting is one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life, especially when they are supposedly over and done with (such as with transatlantic slavery, for instance) or when their oppressive nature is continuously denied (such as with [so-called] free labor or national security). [...] We are not merely reactive subjects but that we are, to use Kodwo Eshun’s word, ‘inaugurating’ ones, and therefore do not need permission [...]. In this, I think, Williams was also right to see that a certain melancholy or what John Berger calls ‘undefeated despair’ is bound to the work of carrying on regardless: to keeping urgent the repair of injustice and the care-taking of the aggrieved and the missing; to keeping urgent the systematic dismantling of the conditions that produce the crises and the misery in the first place [...]. [I]t also involves being or ‘becoming unavailable for servitude’, to use Toni Cade Bambara’s words. […] It’s key to anticipating, inhabiting, making the world you want to live in now, urgently, as if you couldn’t live otherwise […]. To achieve a measure of agency and possibility [...], it is necessary [...] 'to redeem time' [...]. This redemption involves refusing the death sentence and its doom, involves refusing to be treated as if one was never born, fated to a life of abandonment [...].

Text by: Avery F. Gordon. "Some Thoughts on Haunting and Futurity". borderlands 10:2. 2011.

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[T]his context of enhanced militarism and securitisation [...] has led to more widespread social abandonment and more entrenched inequalities [...]. At the same time, there is widespread, daily, active and open political opposition to all this, at the scale at which people can contest it: protecting this group of migrants from [...] confinement and deportation; organising this strike among teachers in this city [...]. And there are also so many people [...] looking for ways to think and live on different - better terms - and doing it in small ways [...]. [W]hat haunts from the past are precisely all those aspirations and actions - small and large, individual and collective - that oppose racial capitalism and empire and live actively other than on those terms of order. [...] Julius Scott called it ‘the common wind.’

Words of Avery F. Gordon. As interviewed by Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah, under the title: “Revolutionary Feminisms: Avery F. Gordon.” As transcribed and published online in the Blog section of Verso Books. 2 September 2020.

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The impetus [...] was to challenge the twinned triumphalism of the [...] ‘End of History’ claim and the [...] claim that the political universe had closed shut [after the 1960s] [...]. The other impetus was to pick up [...] those ‘historical alternatives’ that ‘haunt a given society,’ as Herbert Marcuse (1969) wrote; to find the place where, as Patircia Williams (1991) put it, our ‘longings’ are ‘exiled’. [...] [To invoke] [...] ‘the many-headed hydra of the seventeenth-century revolutionary Atlantic’, those slaves, maids, prisoners, pirates, sailors, heretics, indigenous peoples, commoners and so on who challenged the making of the modern world capitalist system [...] [with their] often illegible, illegitimate or trivialized forms of escape, resistance, opposition and alternative ways of life [...]. [Consider] a standpoint and a mindset for living on better terms than we’re offered, for living as if you had the necessity and the freedom to do so, for living in the acknowledgement that, despite the overwhelming power of all the systems of domination which are trying to kill us, they never quite become us. They are, as Cedric J Robinson used to say, only one condition of our existence or being. [...] [L]iving apart [...]; communing; [...] human, debt, labour, knowledge strikes; [...] non-policing [...]: the ways of non-participation in the given order of things are many, varied and hard to summarize. [...] [A] community [...] of not waiting for another world but of being already there.

Text by: Avery F. Gordon, Katherine Hite, and Daniela Jara. “Haunting and thinking from the Utopian margins: Conversation with Avery Gordon.” Memory Studies. 2020.

[jordannamatlon]

In her recent piece in Comment is Free, “How feminism became capitalism’s handmaiden – and how to reclaim it” Nancy Fraser draws on her own work in political theory to argue that feminism at best has been co-opted by neoliberalism and at worst has been a capitalist venture of the neo-liberal project. What appears at first glance to be a reasoned self-reflection, one that takes stock and responsibility for past alliances and celebrations of strategic moves for the betterment of women’s lives, at second glance reveals the innate and repetitive myopia of White feminism to take account, to converse and think along with Black and Third World Feminists.

Writing from the early 1970s onwards, these scholars and activists have systematically engaged a feminist critique of not only state capitalism, but of a globalised capitalism rooted in colonial legacies. These feminisms have not prioritised “cultural sexism” over economic redistribution. The literature is vast, the examples myriad, and thus, it’s all the more tiring when White feminists speak of second-wave feminism as if it were the only “feminism” and use the pronoun “we” when lamenting the failures of their struggles. Let us just say there is no such thing as a “feminism” as the subject of any sentence that designates the sole position for the critic of patriarchy. For such position has been fractured ever since Sojourner Truth said “Ain’t I a woman too?” There is though a feminist subject-position, the one Fraser is lamenting, which has sat very comfortably in the seat of the self-determined, emancipated subject. That position, of course, is that which she identifies as a contributor to neoliberalism. But that is no surprise, for both her feminism and neoliberalism share the same liberal core that Black and Third World feminists have identified and exposed since very early in the trajectory of feminisms.

The work of A.Y. Davis, Audre Lorde, Himani Bannerji, Avtar Brah, Selma James, Maria Mies, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Silvia Federici, Dorothy Roberts and scores of others, have shattered the limited and exclusionary nature of the conceptual frameworks developed by White feminists in the English speaking world. These scholars and activists have created frameworks of analysis that simultaneously surmount a challenge to and provide a dramatic corrective to both Black Marxist and anti-colonial theory that failed fundamentally to theorise gender and sexuality, and Marxist and socialist feminist thought that continues to fail, in many ways, to account for race, histories of colonisation, and the structural inequities between the so-called developed and developing nation states. And yes, Mies, Federici, and James are white, but Black and Third World Marxist feminisms aspire to political solidarity across the colour line.

The scholars we speak of have consistently developed critiques of capitalist forms of property, exchange, paid and unpaid labour, along with culturally embedded and structural forms of patriarchal violence. Let’s take the example of rape and violence against women. In the path-breaking Women Race and Class, A.Y. Davis argued forcefully that many of the most contemporary and pressing political struggles facing black women are rooted in the particular types of oppression suffered under slavery. Rape and sexual violence are faced by women of all classes, races and sexualities, as Davis noted, but have a different valence for black men and women. The myth of the black rapist and of the violent hypersexual black male caused scores of lynchings during the antebellum era in America. This persistent racist myth provides explanatory value for the contemporary overrepresentation of black men in prisons convicted of rape, and led to the reluctance on the part of African-American women to become involved in early feminist activism against rape that was focused on law enforcement and the judicial system (Davis, 1984). The expropriation of black labour rooted in the logics of slavery repeats itself in the expropriation of convict labour in the post-slavery era, and today, in the unfree labour endemic in the prison industrial complex. (Davis, 2005)

Sexual violence is thus understood as something deriving from slavery and colonisation, affecting both women and men. This history of black women’s bodies as commodity objects to be used, violated at the pleasure of white men remains as a psychic, social, racial trace in contemporary American society. With respect to Native American and First Nations women, colonial era stereotypes of the “squaw” continue in contemporary racialised imaginaries, rendering Indigenous women vulnerable to forms of sexual violence that are always-already racial and recall patterns of violence that emerged through the dispossession of their lands, languages, resources and yes, cultural practices. (See P. Monture-Angus, Kim Anderson, Sherene Razack)

Recent suggestions that feminists should turn their gaze towards unpaid work, the work of care, was analysed by Patricia Hill Collins in Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Power and Consciousness. She emphasises that for African-American women, work in the home that contributes to their families’ well-being can be understood by them as a form of resistance to the social and economic forces that collude to damage African-American children and families. Black feminists have also led the wages for housework campaign, challenging bourgeois norms of the family economy. Following A.Y. Davis, we note that White feminists need to recognise when they engage political strategies that Black and Third World feminists have already been theorising and practising for a long time.

Ending oppression, violence against women, violence against men, particularly of the neo-liberal variety, means embracing the historical, materialist, anti-racist thought of Black and Third World Marxist feminists. Are the White feminists who persist in throwing in the word “race” or “racism” in their otherwise left-liberal approaches to feminism willfully blind/deaf? Are they unable to cede the floor to Black feminism because it would mean the loss of a certain racial privilege? The persistent claim to universalism, which is the core of this White feminism, renders the experiences, thoughts and work of Black and Third World feminists invisible, over and over again. Time’s up!

Brenna Bhandar, Senior Lecturer, SOAS School of Law. Denise Ferreira da Silva, Professor, Queen Mary School of Business and Management.

[figues]

Index, Literature and Manuscript. :)

thank you for the ask  💛 i love seeing you on my dash!

Index: What book character would you like as your best friend?

answered here!

Literature: Top 3 books you want to read this year.

The Common Wind by Julius S. Scott

Revolutionary Feminisms Edited by Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah

and uh i’d like to finally finish The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

Manuscript: What is a book you want to read but are intimidated by?

let me give you the most predictable answer: War and Peace by Tolstoy.

��️

book related asks

[probablyasocialecologist]

Trump, as a brand, signifies and celebrates individual greed, a phantasm of absolute control over a vast property empire, as well as authoritarianism. His blatantly racist, sexist, and ableist hate speech has become a license given to loyal followers to freely unleash similar sentiments. The brand that he had created over several decades that was more-or-less limited to the world of celebrity television, real estate, and other business holdings, was recast as a political brand that would operate as a unique and unprecedented stage for his and his family’s personal capital accumulation, and would engage in a bio-political form of governance that is not only about individuals and communities of consumers (as with most brands) but now operates on the level of national identity and citizenship. That the Trump brand prevailed in the November election reflects a new intensification of the citizen cum consumer; the communicative sphere engaged by the Trump brand marketing strategy for years, the corporate driven “public” platforms of social media, celebrity television, and alt-right websites gave way to political rallies that transformed loyal customers/consumers into a political constituency.

Brenna Bhandar, Possessive Nationalism: Race, Class and the Lifeworlds of Property

[endlessandrea]

„What’s distinctive about haunting, as I used the term (and this is not its only way, of course), is that it is an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known, sometimes very directly, sometimes more obliquely. I used the term ‘haunting’ to describe those singular and yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what’s been in your blind field comes into view.“

Excerpt from the interview with Avery Gordon in „Revolutionary Feminisms“, edited by Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah.

[dissonantdata]

[dcjacobin]

May Meeting: Border Imperialism

Ice Age:  Society as checkpoint | Greg Afinogenov Possessive Nationalism: Race, Class, and the Lifeworlds of Property | Brenna Bhandar White Supremacy and Capitalism Are Deeply Entangled With the Colonial Slave Trade |  Gerald Horne Meeting Details: Library: Shaw (Watha T. Daniel) Neighborhood Library Room: WTD Meeting Room Date: Saturday, May 26, 2018 Time: 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM

[fatehbaz]

Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of doing various projects with artist Natascha Sadr Haghighian [...]. The conversation you mention took place in 2009 in the large, upscale organic Whole Foods supermarket in New York’s Bowery neighbourhood [...] We walked through the Whole Foods [...], talking about the commercialisation of organic food, the way Whole Foods was appropriating radical ecological and political ideas for profit and political agency. Natascha had pointed out a sign in the store that read ‘Power to the People’, and I was describing some of what was not signed in the store that suggested a far more radical anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist ecological approach: People’s Park; MOVE; Earth First!; the Diggers, from whose 1649 manifesto against greed, private property, inequality and war [...]. Natascha raised the question of whether revealing or exposing the hidden facts or histories was effective in producing action or change. [...]

Calling up and out, naming what’s missing, is as much about haunting as it is about history. Naming the Diggers, for example, provides information many might not have, and it also creates a connection across time and space so we who are living now can work to put an end to the conditions that repeat and thus haunt. The exposure or revelation gives notice to the sedimented conditions that make putting that ‘Power for the People’ sign up in a megastore even possible. I’m quite interested in time, the feel of it and what form it takes in social struggles, which I find difficult to express in abstract or academic language. We tend to call this time-form memory, even if the memories are constructed and staged. You’re absolutely right that the force field – the connection – must be activated. It might always be there; that’s certainly my argument about the utopian margins, and Toni Morrison’s argument about those ‘rememories’ that are always waiting for you [...].

The wilful amnesia about anti-racist struggles and racism can be explained in part, given the direction of the discussion with Natascha, by the whitening of radical environmental politics and the history of the commons, such that the Diggers, the various maroon societies, the Seminoles, the Zapatistas and the keelboatmen, for example, appear as if in separate universes and in separate histories rather than part of one.

It’s striking today that despite widespread interest in and attention to climate change and global warming – all school-children know these terms – environmental racism and the histories of those struggles, which necessarily addressed racial capitalism, even if they didn’t name it as such, remain almost completely invisible.

The lack of visibility of a critical environmental justice – as that seasoned environmental anti-racist scholar David N. Pellow has proposed, where the Movement for Black Lives, the prison abolition movement and the anti-occupation struggle of Palestinians are all considered ‘environmental’ or ecological – is evident and to the detriment of dealing with these catastrophic problems. [...]

The point is rather to show what is living and breathing in the place blinded from view. [...]. Movements and activists, whether they make them explicit or not, assume standpoints, historiographies, terms of solidarities and what Alex Lubin calls ‘geographies of liberation.’ [...]. What do matter and are necessary are the deeper understandings, visions, values and connections – the collective wisdom, or what Haghighian calls the emotional intelligence – that are carried [...] and articulated in the daily operating organisational cultures in which activists and movements think and act.

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Words of Avery F. Gordon. As interviewed by Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah. “Revolutionary Feminisms: Avery F. Gordon.” Published online in the Blog section of Verso Books. 2 September 2020. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks added by me.]

[coolshystudentdaze-blog]

While men are paid in full for their labour, women are paid a quarter less than them. Women are the bottom feeders of the social hierarchy, despite being the most generous in giving free labour, otherwise known as “gift labour”. And the battle for women’s rights has spanned for at least a good 150 years yet nothing is moving forward, or rather, nothing seems to be moving in the same direction despite the doubling of women owned agricultural businesses. According to (Allen and Sachs 2013),

“While women are engaged in numerous efforts to change the food system, these efforts are rarely coordinated. Neither are they generally identified as feminist projects, in the sense of being strategically oriented toward improving gender relations”.

The dysfunction of these initiatives and systems have an abundance of causes. Some suggested by both Allen and Sachs and Arlene Voski Avakian and Barbara Haber include: firstly, as much as domesticity is addressed among feminists, cooking and women tend to be negatively associated together and are often interpreted as patriarchal. Secondly, women have individual eating practices, attitudes towards food and traditions on both the individual and cultural level. And finally, too narrow of a focus on promoting women’s movements in the corporate level rather than,” attend[ing] far less to the material and sociocultural domains” (Allen and Sachs 2006).

I believe that the negative association of patriarchy and cooking to be rooted in the systematic approaches it connotes- for example, its fundamental presence has caused cultural attitudes and beliefs that men are superior to women. However the negative associations of patriarchy are only attached because of their repercussions from a system that has misunderstood the difference between equality and equity. Because men work, does not necessarily mean that women must work in order to achieve balance. In fact, women should effectively have the choice and right to work, but it should not be the only thing emphasized, and valued. Our society has not changed in the sense that there is still a heavy The domestic work that is produced at home should be equally valued in our society.

I find it strange that although these issues seem to already have been addressed and the knowledge already propagated (for example in the article by Brenna Bhandar and Denise Ferreira da Silva which stated that, "Black feminists have also led the wages for housework campaign, challenging bourgeois norms of the family economy" there is rather, no grounded solution offered from either of these authors. I agree, that understanding gender relations is vital to spur action and this tends to be a very individual/cultural independant notion however, no systematic solutions have been offered not established. It is merely a call to improve knowledge, we need to join more hands together and figure out a way by which we can. Global collaboration is key.

Works Cited Allen, Patricia, and Carolyn Sachs. “WOMEN AND FOOD CHAINS1: THE GENDERED POLITICS OF FOOD.” International Journal of Sociology of Food and Agriculture, vol. 15, no. 1, Apr. 2007, pp. 1–23., doi:0798-1759. Avian, Arlene Voski, and Barbara Haber. FROM BETTY CROCKER TO FEMINIST FOOD STUDIES. University of Massachusetts Press Amherst & Boston, 2005, scholarworks.umass.edu/umpress_fbc/3/. Bhandar, Brenna. “Critical Legal Studies and the Politics of Property.” Researching Property Law, 2016, pp. 60–76., doi:10.1007/978-1-137-48618-9_5.

[nadiragrsj]

‘Girl Power!’ This is often the statement emblazoned on so many of today’s companies, slogans, and products that seek to capitalize on the recent popularity that the feminist movement has garnered in mainstream media. However, is this statement really as progressive for women as it claims to be? Is being a Career Woman as liberating as neo liberal feminism claims it is? When one thinks of Girl Power, often the image that springs to mind is that of the successful career woman. A Modern Woman. However, have you noticed that behind this career woman is usually a tired woman who comes back home to her family, and is expected to cook and take care of them to ensure their happiness. This extra labor is the unspoken part of being a Modern Woman, work that is often denied as labor by the Modern Woman herself, due to pressures from the trace expectations of womanhood that remain from past generations. But how did the ideal of womanhood transform from being the guardian of the household to the career woman who is also expected to perform housekeeping tasks? With the rise of neoliberalism, feminism followed suit, and feminism transformed from a movement that focused on the solidarity of women to one that focused on the advancement of individual women (Fraser). However, Fraser’s argument is weakened by the fact that Da Silva/Other woman, because Black and ‘Third World’ feminists have been espousing work at home ideals before Fraser, and the fact that she didn’t refer to their work is Messed Up. Also, while for some women, no longer cooking may be freedom from the traditional roles they’ve been shoehorned in, for other women, namely women of color, or women coming from colonized nations, cooking is a way from them to retain their importance within their culture, (e.g. the women bread makers from Lebanon) as well as to retain their culture from being completely taken over by the colonizer. And the fact that they Chose to be in their traditional role as housekeeper can be seen as feminist because they choose their role without pressures (e.g neoliberal Career Woman rhetoric) to not be a certain way. Recently, feminists have argued for the idea of paid housework, which Brenna Bhandar and Denise Ferreira da Silva argue, in their essay ‘White Feminist Fatigue Syndrome’, stating that Patricia Hill Collins wrote that ‘African American women , work in the home that contributes to their families’ well-being can be understood by them as a form of resistance to the social and economic forces that collude to damage African-American children and families. However, they did not specify in what way this Countries that have been colonized often find their own food ‘colonized’ by their colonizer, i.e. their ethnic dishes neutralized, watered down, and essentially altered to fit the tastes of the people in the colonizer’s country. With the power that comes with being a colonizer, chances are the food in the colonizer’s country might become more well known than the food in the colonized country. A good example of this is curry from India. After India was colonized by the british, many of them took back Indian food, all simplified into ‘curry’ when in fact, in their home country those dishes are known by other names. By delving into the role of being chefs and cooks, women of colonized nations can reclaim their country’s culture, and preserve their culinary heritage. However, steps need to be taken to make sure that women are not taken advantage of in these previously mentioned fields. For women who cook, there should be a greater opportunity for equality in the fields of food production, with greater numbers of women being well paid head chefs in restaurants.

[houseofthelabyrinth]

"[I]n the settler colony, use remains at the core of prevailing definitions of aboriginal title. Governed by an ideology of improvement, the manner in which First Nations have historically used their land and whether it conforms to an idea of cultivation and settlement that emerged during the transition to agrarian capitalism in England has formed a primary criterion in adjudicating aboriginal title claims in the Canadian context, and [...] in the Israeli/Palestinian context as well. Indigenous ways of using and owning land that don't conform to this ideal of settlement have been relegated to a prehistory of modern law. This ideology of improvement is one that binds together land and its populations; land that was not cultivated for the purposes of contributing to a burgeoning agrarian capitalist economy by industrious laborers was, from the early seventeenth century onward, deemed to be waste. Whereas wasteland was free for appropriation, those who maintained subsistence modes of cultivation, for instance, were cast as in need of improvement through assimilation into a civilized (read English) population and ways of living. [T]he racial regime of ownership that articulates both land and its people as in need of improvement reappears across many colonial jurisdictions at different historical junctures, each with their own specificities."

Brenna Bhandar, "Use" in The Colonial Lives of Property: (Duke University, 2018), 36.