We’re back! After a not-so-brief hiatus, we’re excited to bring you a very special and energizing episode. James and Sid talk with Dr. Vincent Lloyd about his latest book, Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination. In this lively conversation, your hosts and Vincent explore the new moral and political vocabulary of contemporary Black racial justice. Breaking down barriers between activist and academic knowledge-production, Black Dignity offers a novel and urgent perspective on anti-Black domination, Black love, Black rage, Black futures, Black struggle, and, most importantly, Black dignity. In this wide-ranging conversation, we ask Vincent how he engages with debates around Afropessimism and Black optimism, the role of religion, theology, and struggle, Black feminist thinking, the Black radical tradition, differences between liberals and leftists, revolution and abolition, and much, much more. The thoughtful exchanges between James, our resident expert on all things religious, theological, and mystical, and Vincent on ontology, apophatics, soteriology, conjuring, and spirituality are not to be missed.

Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes or Spotify. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.

Links:

• Dr. Vincent Lloyd’s Faculty Bio
• Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination (Yale UP, 2022) Press website
• Villanova University Center for Political Theology and Political Theology Network Blog 
  

In this episode, John is joined by his colleague, Dr. Breea Willingham, to discuss her multiple forms of work on higher education in prisons, both within and without academia. Their conversation about the new Journal of Higher Education in Prison, the Jamii Sisterhood, the States of Incarceration Project, and being a Black woman abolitionist in the discipline of Criminal Justice raises several pressing questions: how does one define an academic field that seeks to abolish the need for that very field? How do Black women scholars enact political practices between academic institutions that reject them and carceral systems that would capture them? What is abolitionist pedagogy at a rural PWI in a county and region structured by their carceral warehousing of Black and Brown people? How are Black women made hyper (in)visible by academia and by American society? Listen in as we engage these and related issues.

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes or Spotify. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.

Links:

• Dr. Breea Willingham on twitter and at the Jamii Sisterhood
• Volume I, Issue 1 of the Journal of Higher Education in Prison
• The Jamii Sisterhood on facebook, including the announcement of their Spring 2022 symposium
• SUNY Plattsburgh’s contribution to States of Incarceration, “Cuffs to Classroom: College in Prison — How Can Higher Education Redefine Mass Incarceration in New York’s North Country“; Mountain Lake PBS coverage of the exhibition
• Willingham’s TedXArcadia talk, “Blinded By My Black Skin: The Hyper (In)visibility of Black Women“

Photo courtesy of Dr. Breea Willingham

Back from a hiatus in western Massachusetts, B joins John and special guest co-host Alyssa Ruth Mazer to discuss Miguel de Beistegui’s book The Government of Desire: A Genealogy of the Liberal Subject. What is a liberal subject and how does desire open up its discourses and genealogy and governmentalities? Did Beistegui try to out-Foucault…Foucault, the book’s stated intellectual inspiration? The team attempts a reparative reading of the Introduction, Conclusion and Beistegui’s chapters on recognition. But these three self-professed genealogists hit a snag. Critiquing the murky depths of desire and recognition requires more than what the Western canon provides! What happened to queer theory? Is there feminism at all? Could Black and Indigenous theories of personhood have made a more prominent appearance? Is there a “true” kind of resistance? With so much to discuss, you can’t not desire tuning in!

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes or Spotify. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.

Links:

• De Beistegui’s homepage at University of Warwick
• De Beistegui, “The Political Honour of Psychoanalysis” talk at Warwick (2015)
• Relevant Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries: desire; recognition; Foucault
• Combahee River Collective Statement at Black Past
• Remembering Lauren Berlant (UChicago; Duke)
• Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights
• Wendy Brown, “Suffering Rights as Paradoxes” (2000) in Constellations

In this episode, Emily and John welcome John’s colleague Gary Kroll for a discussion of Jedediah Purdy‘s After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. We map the contours of the book, asking questions about the scope of the argument and both the promises and limits of its framework. Throughout we interrogate the concepts of the Anthropocene, humanism, the posthuman (are they incompatible??), and democracy, and ask what work the environmental imaginary does. In classic Always Already fashion, notions of scientific authority appear along with our favorite questions: what of capitalism, and wherefore art the feminist lens? And, how would an engagement with Indigenous cosmologies and politics transform Purdy’s own environmental imagination? Tune in to help us welcome our first guest holding the very official title Mother of Dragons! 

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes or Spotify. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.

Links:

• Purdy talk about After Nature at Duke in 2015
• “The New Nature” forum at Boston Review
• Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock
• Kyle Whyte, “Indigenous environmental justice: Anti-colonial action through kinship“
• Collected Murray Bookchin writings at the Anarchist Library
• William Cronon, Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature
• Past AAP episodes of note: James’ interview with JT Roane on plotting the Black Commons and the racial capitalocene; discussion of Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674368224

https://www.law.columbia.edu/faculty/jedediah-s-purdy

John is joined by friends-of-the-show Tyler Tully and Danielle Hanley to discuss Audra Simpson‘s Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Duke UP, 2014). The book — simultaneously a work of political theory, ethnography, and settler colonial studies — thinks with the Kahnawà:ke Mohawks to examine the situated production and assertion of Indigenous political subjectivities, membership(s), sovereignties, knowledges, practices, and much more.

We talk through questions of a politics of refusal (and a politics of recognition and governance by settler states), ongoingness of settler colonialism (and how Simpsons confronts it), race and indigeneity (and why BIPOC might not be so great), Indigenous and settler epistemologies, dispossession and heteropatriarchy, the libidinal economy of white saviorism, and much more. Not to mention, there is extensive and extremely deserved dragging of John Locke. Are we in a post-, de-, and/or anti-colonial frame? Tune in to find out.

And, stay tuned for the glorious return of giving advice to listener questions! We tackle a question about organizing notes, texts, sources, etc., which unsurprisingly becomes a sort of meditation on our own academic trajectories, peccadillos, and bugaboos.

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes or Spotify. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.

Links:

• Simpson’s homepage at Columbia
• Simpson’s 2016 Theory & Event article, “The State Is a Man: Theresa Spence, Loretta Saunders and the Gendered Costs of Settler Sovereignty”
• “Reconciliation and its Discontents: Settler Governance in an Age of Sorrow” lecture by Simpson
• Tyler Tully, “Epistemological Sacrifice Zones and the Decolonization of Religion“
  

This episode, Rachel and John have the honor and pleasure of interviewing Dr. Jane Anna Gordon and Dr. Drucilla Cornell about their new edited volume, Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg. Part of the Creolizing the Canon series, this volume examines the political economy and political philosophies of Polish Marxist thinker and revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, from her work on imperialism and the expanded reproduction of capital, to the violence of fascism, and her theory of primitive accumulation. The volume also considers her reception across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, asking how her work can be expanded and applied in contemporary revolutionary politics.

As you have may have guessed from our podcast series on Luxemburg and our episode on Geraldine Heng, Rachel, Sid, and John have a chapter in the volume! We rethink primitive accumulation as a concept for theories of racial capitalism. For more about the book, check out the book panel from the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung’s Rosa Luxemburg at 150: Revisiting Her Radical Life and Legacy conference from March 2021.

We begin by asking Gordon and Cornell about the concept of “creolization” and its relevance for the work of Luxemburg. Next we turn to ask about racism and capitalism, about social reproduction and Marxist feminism, and about how Rosa’s work points us to the co-constitutive nature of racism, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism. Finally, we ask what Rosa would think about theories of neoliberalism and contemporary forms of imperialism. Join us for this rich discussion of the creolized Rosa Luxemburg’s socialist horizons.

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes or Spotify. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here

Links:

• Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung
• Red Rosa
• “History and Heartbreak: The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg”
• Trailer, Rosa Luxemburg (film)

In this episode, Emily and Rachel talk with the inimitable Eric Bayruns García, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Cal State San Bernardino, about two recent articles. Specializing in philosophy of race, epistemology, and Latin American philosophy, Bayruns García’s writing and teaching addresses racial injustice, colonialism, and epistemologies of ignorance, among other topics. In this episode we discuss two recent articles, “How Racial Injustice Affects News-Based Inferences,” in Episteme, and “Expression-Style Exclusion,” in Social Epistemology. We begin by discussing Bayruns García’s motivation for both articles and the research out of which they arise. Next, we delve into the difference between knowledge and understanding, and the implications of considering expression-style exclusion for the neoliberal university. We conclude by hearing Bayruns García’s thoughts about the stakes and implications of both pieces for radical politics and transformation. Tune in for this awesome conversation between giddily reuniting CUNY alums!

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.

https://alwaysalreadypodcast.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/garcia.mp3

Links:

• Eric’s website
• Eric on the Philosophy in Color podcast
• An interview with Eric on the APA blog
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries on philosophy of race, epistemology, and Latin American philosophy
• Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, edited by Sullivan and Tuana

 

In this episode, Emily, James, and John enter the Worrisome World-Making of Disney () via How to Read Donald Duck, a 1971 Chilean Marxist critique of the American imperial-capitalist project of Disney, republished in 2018. Our trio approaches the book in form and content, and they discuss its social opposition through state censorship — whether as literal book-burning under the Pinochet regime or the banal violence of copyright infringement litigation in the United States — as well as praise the clarity of its cultural studies analysis of the Donald Duck comic strip (1938-1995). The comic, let us remind you, depicted the bourgeois imaginaries of the ne’er-do-well Donald Duck; his miserly ol’ Uncle Scrooge McDuck; everyone’s pal Daisy; our favorite triplets Huey, Dewey, and Louis; and all the aspiring burghers of Duckburg…and the realms beyond. Does the “fantasia” and “magic of Disney” truly serve to mystify the processes of primitive accumulation? Is Scrooge McDuck’s Monroe-Doctrine, Robber-baron aesthetic the farcical return of Hobbes’ Leviathan? What might the fetishization of gold teach children about the value of labor? Why are there only uncles and aunts in Duckburg? What happened to production, reproduction, labor, class, and social antagonism? What does Donald Duck make invisible, and what does it seek to make natural? Is Donald Trump Scrooge? Is the Marvel Cinematic Universe the bourgeois ideology machine of our time? Bonus: Find out why you should be simultaneously terrified of the acronym E.P.C.O.T. and grateful Walt Disney’s delusions of grandeur sank right back into the swampy Florida glades from which they sprung. Double bonus: critical mallard studies. Always Already Medici Club patron Jason H requested we discuss this book, thank you Jason! Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.

 

https://alwaysalreadypodcast.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/donaldduck.mp3

 

Links:

• How to Read Donald Duck, OR Books
• Ariel Dorfman in the Guardian
• New Yorker review
• Defunctland: E.P.C.O.T.
• Donald Trump or Scrooge McDuck
• follow Zero Sum Empire podcast on Twitter
• Naomi Klein on the Chicago Boys in Chile
• Jean Baudrillard on Disney, Disneyland, and America, in “Simulacra and Simulations”

 

 

Join Emily, B, Sid, and John for a classic AAP text discussion, this time featuring W.E.B. Du Bois’s Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil. Our discussion begins (perhaps unsurprisingly!) with knowledge, education, and epistemology, and spans Du Bois’s analysis of racial capitalism, his materialism, aesthetics, canonization as a political theorist, and more. We interrogate Du Bois as a democratic theorist in his own right, analyze his (maybe) humanism and (maybe) universalism, and ask, what does it mean to read DuBois as a prescient diagnostician of our own political moment (and who is the revolutionary subject?)? While we barely scratch the surface of all this book has to offer (what of “work,” whiteness, poetics, and proto-feminism in this text?!), we welcome you to join us for the close reading, and stay for the water puns!

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.

https://alwaysalreadypodcast.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/dubois-darkwater.mp3

 

Links:

• Gutenberg ebook of Darkwater
• NAACP biography of Du Bois
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Du Bois
• Du Bois Bibliography at the National Archives
• Keisha Blain on Du Bois, Pan-Africanism, and Anti-colonialism
• Farah Griffin on Black Feminists and Du Bois
• Ange-Marie Hancock on Du Bois and Intersectionality
• J. Phillip Thompson on “Capitalism, Democracy, and Du Bois’s Two Proletariats”
• Ella Myers on Du Bois and white sadism

W.E.B. Du Bois in 1918; from WikiMedia Commons

 

First edition of Darkwater; from WikiMedia Commons

In this episode, John welcomes Jessica Blatt, Associate Professor of Political Science at Marymount Manhattan College, for a conversation about her 2018 book Race and the Making of American Political Science. What was political science’s role in shaping a de-radicalizing ‘race relations’ paradigm? How did the early discipline of political science turned to categories of ‘race’ in a bid for foundation funding and claims to scientific knowledge? What are the pedagogical implications for political scientists today of the book and of this genealogy of racism in the discipline? Tune in to explore these and other questions about a sometimes (read: frequently) ahistorical and not particularly self-reflective discipline).

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.

https://alwaysalreadypodcast.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/blatt-interview.mp3

 

Links:

• Follow Jessica Blatt on Twitter
• A 2019 interview with Blatt at the Society for U.S. Intellectual History
• A 2018 interview with Blatt on Detroit Today
• A 2018 talk by Blatt, “With a Little Help from our Friends: Scientific Racism and the Making of Modern Political Science“
• Books mentioned: Leah Gordon, From Power to Prejudice: The Rise of Racial Individualism in Midcentury America; Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics; Alice O’Connor: Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History

 

 

In this Epistemic Unruliness interview, James features Savanna Touré, Lincoln Mondy, and Amirio Freeman — the activists-creatives at the Empty Your Venmo Mutual Aid Fund for Black LGBTQ+ youth. The collective details their coming together within Washington, D.C. activist networks and highlights the distinction of their mutual aid/collective care mobilizations and their historic models from prevailing charity modes and non-profit/NGO strategies of social action. Far from merely offering material support, Empty Your Venmo “conjures audacity” by inspiring Black LGBTQ+ youth to dream lavishly of futurity, this institutional love praxis mirroring the intimacy that animates Lincoln and Amirio’s personal relationship. Not only will listeners of this episode learn more about the important work of Empty Your Venmo, but, with no shortage of kikis and giggity-goos, they’ll get the tea about Amirio’s experience as a student in the first class James ever taught, including the ways Amirio’s research on the house-ballroom community have informed Empty Your Venmo’s critical horizon of Black LGBTQ+ mutual aid. Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here. https://alwaysalreadypodcast.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/mutualaid.mp3 Links:

• Empty Your Venmo (slideshow presentation here)
• “MUTUAL AID NOW: Building Collective Care” webinar
• Freedom Fighters DC
• Advocates for Youth
• “Google Docs and Synced Calendars Are A Key Part Of Lincoln and Amirio’s Modern Relationship” Bumble profile