This article proposes a new interpretation of slave religious experience in mid-republican Rome. Select passages from Plautine comedy and Cato the Elder's De agri cultura are paired with material culture as well as comparative evidence—mostly from studies of Black Atlantic slave religions—to reconstruct select aspects of a specific and distinctive slave “religiosity” in the era of large-scale enslavements. I work towards this reconstruction first by considering the subordination of slaves as religious agents before turning to slaves’ practice of certain forms (...) of religious expertise in the teeth of subordination and policing. After transitioning to an assessment of slave religiosity's role in the pursuit of freedom, I conclude with a set of methodological justifications for this paper's line of inquiry. (shrink)

This essay turns to the late thought of Martin Luther King Jr. to bring matters of faith back into debates about dissent in liberal democracies. Drawing on unpublished speeches as well as scholarship in Black theology, religious studies, and political theory, I contend that the post-1965 King is not as interested in moral or pragmatic principles as many democratic theorists think. The late King’s movement, I argue, is animated by what Black liberation theologian James Cone calls “black faith.” Manifesting Jesus’s (...) liberating love—a love that the late King believes already transformed and was still transforming the world—this movement with the poor and dispossessed is caring yet forceful, quotidian yet spectacular, and nonviolent yet revolutionary. Foregrounding the late King’s black faith and the movement it animates, I conclude, opens up new horizons for theorizing dissent. (shrink)

En este artículo elaboro una concepción filosófica del cimarronaje para ponerlo en conversación, a grosso modo, con el pensamiento decolonial. Esto consiste en la discusión del concepto cimarronería sociogénica, que se define como la huida de las fuerzas opresoras de la modernidad europea a través de una praxis política decolonial, y la cimarronería analéctica, que defino como la huida de la modernidad europea misma. Planteo que la relación entre estos dos fenómenos constituye lo que he llamado la doble crítica cimarrona (...) y que su manifestación concreta, en distintas configuraciones, constituye lo que he denominado lógicas cimarronas. Sostengo que la cimarronería analéctica tiene un elemento pedagógico que tiene el potencial de iniciar un giro decolonial. Finalmente, miro de manera resumida los sucesos del verano puertorriqueño de 2019 a través de este marco teórico, que he denominado filosofía del cimarronaje, para identificar rasgos de cimarronaje, en el sentido ontológico que abordo, en la sociedad puertorriqueña contemporánea y algunos paralelos con la Revolución Haitiana. (shrink)

This chapter introduces W.E.B. Du Bois’s original political thought and his strategies for political advocacy. It is limited to explaining the pressure he puts on the liberal social contract tradition, which prioritizes the public values of freedom and equality for establishing fair and inclusive terms of political membership. However, unlike most liberal theorists, Du Bois’s political thought concentrates on the politics of race, colonialism, gender, and labor, among other themes, in order to redefine how political theorists and activists should build (...) a democratic polity that is truly free and equal for all. Additionally, this chapter defines some key concepts Du Bois developed to scrutinize a white-controlled world that does not welcome black and brown persons as moral equals. These trailblazing concepts include: the doctrine of racialism, double consciousness, and Pan-Africanism. Finally, this chapter defends Du Bois’s contributions to black feminist thought and American labor politics, which inspired major social justice movements in the twentieth century, in which he played a notable role. (shrink)

In recent years, images of climate catastrophe have become commonplace. However, Black visions of the confluence of the Anthropocene and the apocalypse have been largely ignored. As we argue in this article, Black social thought offers crucial resources for drawing out the implicit exclusions of dominant representations of climate breakdown and developing an alternative account of the planet’s future. By reading a range of critical race theorists, from Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois to Octavia Butler and Ta-Nehisi (...) Coates, we propose a rethinking of the climate apocalypse. The African American theoretical and cultural tradition elaborates an image of the end of the world that emphasises the non-revelatory nature of climate catastrophe, warns against associating collapse with rebirth, and articulates a mode of maroon survivalism in which the apocalypse is an event to be endured and escaped rather than fatalistically expected or infinitely delayed. (shrink)

This article turns to the theoretical and practical aspects of recent abolitionist praxis to illuminate an expanded notion of politics that is attentive to lived experience and concerns for self-preservation, on the one hand, and to state- and citizen-oriented forms of political action, on the other. The incorporation of healing justice practices and self-care within movement spaces, the mutual-aid of homecoming rituals for those bailed out of jail, the development of transformative justice processes, link what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (...) call the fugitive sociality of these spaces as opposed to direct political action. Challenging an opposition between sociality and politics, I argue that abolitionist praxis recognizes how restorative activities and fugitive spaces are not opposed to politics but are rather important and necessary ways of stimulating and sustaining activism. By incorporating and making these practices central, I argue that contemporary abolitionist praxis challenges theorists, debating the questions of whether and how racial repair might be possible, to reconsider their notions of politics. Specifically, this repair praxis suggests the limits of both state-centered and insurgent accounts of politics, absent practices focused on survival, to “make ready” citizens and institutions for abolition democracy. (shrink)

The neo-republican conception of freedom as non-domination has emerged as a powerful framework for conceptualizing the dynamic relationship between power, democracy, and constitutionalism in modernity. Despite this, I argue that adaptations of republican freedom to the problem of slavery displace attention to race and foreclose more productive ways of addressing how racial slavery constitutes a distinct form of oppression. To illuminate the limitations of neo-republicanism, I turn to the political thought of abolitionists David Walker and Ottobah Cugoano. Both utilize comparative (...) histories of race and slavery to reveal the specificity of modern slavery as a form of oppression, which cannot be captured as an issue of domination in the technical sense of the term. They thus pose challenges to neo-republican theory for its failure to fully appreciate the historical differences between ancient and modern slavery. To do so would illuminate how neo-republican theory faces severe limitations in providing an adequate conceptualization of oppression in the case of racial slavery. (shrink)

Through a study of Gandhian political writings in mid-twentieth-century India, this article explores the neglected question of how the issue of representative democracy shaped anticolonial thought. The rise of a Gandhian perspective on electoral representation was made possible by the account of modern democracy given in Gandhi’s "Hind Swaraj" (1909). From the 1930s, four key Indian thinkers influenced by Gandhi expanded on "Hind Swaraj" to argue that capitalist economics were a threat to democratic equality and produced the kinds of unaccountability (...) and elite capture of legislatures that they identified in Western European parliamentary states. In response, Gandhian thinkers developed proposals for federalist postcolonial constitutions, combining a system of participatory legislative councils with collectivist agrarian socialism. I trace the intellectual origins of Gandhian democratic thought in the 1930s and 1940s and outline how its main proponents articulated ideas of antiparliamentarism and moral economics. Revisiting the Gandhian tradition, I suggest, highlights the importance of economic ethics in participatory theories of democracy and popular sovereignty. (shrink)

El contexto de la crisis sanitaria por la Covid-19 ha exigido una profunda reflexión sobre el presente que vivimos. Una de las propuestas es asumir este momento como una “coronacrisis”, entendida como una categoría para significar cómo la pandemia exacerba la crisis multifacética de la civilización capitalista occidental en su era neoliberal; lo que ha puesto al desnudo la dialéctica de la muerte y la vida, posicionada en el centro de la lucha contra la negritud. Las consecuencias de la pandemia (...) rápidamente se analizaron desde los códigos de la blancura. En este artículo proponemos un acercamiento a este fenómeno, desde la zona del no ser de la herencia afro de nuestro continente. Situándonos en este momento de la enunciación, no sólo se abre la oportunidad de una mayor comprensión de lo vivido hasta ahora, sino que, de igual manera, podemos buscar y encontrar salidas a dicha crisis. (shrink)

In this article, we present participatory action research as a radical act of humanity: a direct response to real dehumanization of vulnerable communities. We argue, as an enactment of critic...

Several recent works in political theory argue that exit, rather than being a coward’s choice, is a potent mode of resistance that is particularly well suited to the current political era. These works reclaim exit, seeing it as a method of political opposition. While innovative and illuminating, these accounts are limited because they tend to treat all exits as resistance, regardless of context or content, and they are inclined to over-saturate exit with oppositional political meaning. I argue that resistant exit (...) should be more narrowly defined. By examining a range of empirical cases, I identify and explore three distinctive characteristics of this particular type of opposition. In addition to clarifying a recently developed idea in current scholarship, this article provides a systematic way for scholars to understand and interpret the intersection between resistance and exit. (shrink)