Since September 11th, we frequently hear that political differences should be put aside: the real struggle is between good and evil. What does this mean for political and social life? Is there a 'Third Way' beyond left and right, and if so, should we fear or welcome it? This thought-provoking book by Chantal Mouffe, a globally recognized political author, presents a timely account of the current state of democracy, affording readers the most relevant and up-to-date information. Arguing that liberal 'third way thinking' ignores fundamental, conflicting aspects of human nature, Mouffe states that, far from expanding democracy, globalization is undermining the combative and radical heart of democratic life. Going back first to Aristotle, she identifies the historical origins of the political and reflects on the Enlightenment, and the social contract, arguing that in spite of its good intentions, it levelled the radical core of political life. Contemporary examples, including the Iraq war, racism and the rise of the far right, are used to illustrate and support her theory that far from combating extremism, the quest for consensus politics undermines the ability to challenge it. These case studies are also highly effective points of reference for student revision. On the Political is a stimulating argument about the future of politics and addresses the most fundamental aspects of democracy that will aid further study.

On the political

Our goal in this article is to remind readers what is unsettling about decolonization. Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. The easy adoption of decolonizing discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship, evidenced by the increasing number of calls to “decolonize our schools,” or use “decolonizing methods,” or, “decolonize student thinking”, turns decolonization into a metaphor. As important as their goals may be, social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches that decenter settler perspectives have objectives that may be incommensurable with decolonization. Because settler colonialism is built upon an entangled triad structure of settler-native-slave, the decolonial desires of white, non-white, immigrant, postcolonial, and oppressed people, can similarly be entangled in resettlement, reoccupation, and reinhabitation that actually further settler colonialism. The metaphorization of decolonization makes possible a set of evasions, or “settler moves to innocence”, that problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity. In this article, we analyze multiple settler moves towards innocence in order to forward “an ethic of incommensurability” that recognizes what is distinct and what is sovereign for project(s) of decolonization in relation to human and civil rights based social justice projects. We also point to unsettling themes within transnational/Third World decolonizations, abolition, and critical space-place pedagogies, which challenge the coalescence of social justice endeavors, making room for more meaningful potential alliances.

https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/download/18630/15554

Decolonization is not a metaphor

A critique of postcolonial reason: Toward a history of the vanishing present

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Now 1 1. Blackness: The Human 17 2. Bare Life: The Flesh 33 3. Assemblages: Articulation 46 4. Racism: Biopolitics 53 5. Law: Property 74 6. Depravation: Pornotropes 89 7. Deprivation: Hunger 113 8. Freedom: Soon 125 Notes 139 Bibliography 181 Index 205

Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human

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Red skin, white masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition

Contents Preface: Full Fathom Five Introduction: Indigenous Critical Theory and the Diminishing Returns of Civilization 1. Is and Was: Poststructural Indians without Ancestry 2. "This Island's Mine": The Parallax Logics of Caliban's Cacophony 3. The Masks of Conquest: Wilson Harris's Jonestown and the Thresholds of Grievability 4. "Been to the Nation, Lord, but I Couldn't Stay There": Cherokee Freedmen, Internal Colonialism, and the Racialization of Citizenship 5. Satisfied with Stones: Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization and the Discourses of Resistance 6. Killing States: Removals, Other Americans, and the "Pale Promise of Democracy" Conclusion: Zombie Imperialism Acknowledgments Notes Index

https://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/viewFile/1665/1492

The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism

The Transit of Empire

This essay introduces and theorizes the central concerns of this special issue, “Economies of Dispossession: Indigeneity, Race, Capitalism.” Financialization, debt, and the accelerated concentration of wealth today work through social relations already configured and disposed by imperial conquest and racial capitalism. In the Americas broadly and the United States specifically, colonization and transatlantic slavery set in motion the dynamics and differential racialized valuations that continue to underwrite particular forms of subjection, property, commerce, and territoriality. The conception of economies of dispossession introduced in this essay draws attention to the overriding importance of rationalities of abstraction and commensurability for racial capitalism. The essay problematizes the ways in which dispossession is conventionally treated as a self-evident and circumscribed practice of unjust taking and subtractive action. Instead, working across the lethal confluences of imperial conquest and racial capitalist predation, this essay critically situates the logic of propriation that organizes and underwrites predatory value in the historical present. Against the commensurabilities and rationalities of debt and finance capitalism, conditioned through the proprietary logics of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, the essay gestures toward alternative frameworks for building collective capacities for what the authors describe as a grounded relationality.

/pdf/predatory-value-economies-of-dispossession-and-disturbed-2nw19f0ukq.pdf

Predatory Value: Economies of Dispossession and Disturbed Relationalities

This introductory essay addresses the conditions for possible exchange between subaltern studies and indigenous and American Indian studies. It highlights the special significance of Spivak's ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ as an inaugurating moment of postcolonial studies in the US with important implications for those working in indigenous studies. Scholars in postcolonial and indigenous/American Indian studies share an interest in challenging the logics of colonialism and deploying incommensurability as a critical tool. However, the essay also points to tensions between postcolonial and indigenous studies that derive from indigenous people's sense of living under ongoing colonial projects – and not just colonial legacies – and from postcolonial studies’ over-reliance on models of colonialism in South Asia and Africa that do not necessarily speak to the settler colonies of the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. Besides tracing the convergences and tensions that mark the relation between indigenous and post...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/1369801X.2011.545574

Jodi A. Byrd

Papers

The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism

The Transit of Empire

Predatory Value: Economies of Dispossession and Disturbed Relationalities

Between subalternity and indigeneity

The Masks of Conquest