#multiheaded hydra of revolutionary black atlantic

[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.