Showing papers in "Wsq: Women's Studies Quarterly in 2014"

The Spirit of the Laws

Abstract: Joseph Harrington is the author of Things Come On (an amneoir) (Wesleyan University Press, 2011), a mixed-genre work relating the twinned narratives of the Watergate scandal and his mother’s cancer; it was a Rumpus Poetry Book Club selection. He is the author of the chapbooks Earth Day Suite (Beard of Bees, 2010) and Of Some Sky (Bedouin, forthcoming), as well as the critical work Poetry and the Public (Wesleyan University Press, 2002). His creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bombay Gin, Hotel Amerika, Colorado Review, 1913: a journal of forms, and Fact-Simile, among others. Harrington is the recipient of a Millay Colony residency and a Fulbright Chair. The Spirit of the Laws

Building Bridges: Articulating Dalit and African American Women's Solidarity

Abstract: The new millennium began with a dialogue between caste and race among activists at the United Nations Durban Conference on Racism and Racial Discrimination, 2001. It was at this conference that the universal human rights discourse engaged with the specifics of caste stratification and discrimination in India. In the wake of this historical moment, I conceived my idea of "building bridges" to outline a comparative model that might allow us to expand the contours of feminist theory and praxis and provide a blueprint for agitations that call for structural changes. More specifically, in this article I concentrate on the specific hurdles of two marginalized groups-Dalit (Untouchable) women in India and African American women in the United States-in order to investigate questions of power, identity, and oppression among them.Delving into personal experiences of Dalit and African American womens day-to-day living, I construct a "margin-to-margin" framework to investigate the possibilities of solidarity between the two groups of women, given the shared history of patriarchy as well as the ways they have been silenced by women from the dominant caste/race. By a margin-to-margin framework, I mean the juxtaposition of seemingly disparate margins (for my purposes, caste and race and Dalit and African American women), in order to construct new knowledge and enable political solidarity to build conscious and sustained commitment to challenge social injustice. Moreover, I argue that centering on the particular historical experiences, specific contexts, contradictions, and connections between the marginalized "Dalit of the Dalits"-Dalit and African American women-allows for the most inclusive and productive politics, developing of new feminist frameworks, and critical decoding of systemic power structures.The timing of Dalit and African American womens solidarity is most significant because the U.S. Congress (like its British and European counterparts) has seriously begun to recognize the issue of caste in India. Significantly, working margin to margin privileges avantage point from which to analyze the deep and common continuities of structures of law, education, feminism, capital, and labor affecting Dalit and African American women in different contexts. An intergroup exchange and feminist engagement facilitates the envisioning of broader and joint struggles between subordinated populations across the globe. It also promotes political possibilities for women to express their alternative views of the conceptual categories as well as actual processes of caste, race, gender and sexuality, and feminism (s).My essay makes important contributions to colonial history and feminist theory and practice. Most significantly, it highlights the politics of "location" within South Asia as a critical ground for producing new theoretical frameworks in feminism. In this essay, I use the particular dynamics of the South Asian position and, more specifically, the Dalit condition to engage with African American feminists in the United States and scrutinize history, revise certain feminist insights, and provide tools to tackle contemporary challenges of feminism. I draw upon works of Dalit and African American "womanist-humanists," such as Baby Kamble, Shantabai Kamble, Kumud Pawde, Urmila Pawar, Shantabai Dani, bell hooks, Angela Davis, Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberle Crenshaw, and Audre Lorde, and analyze some shared historical experiences and feminist and political theories.1Thinking "Margin to Margin": Practicing Political SolidarityMethodologically, I use the margin-to-margin framework for two intimately tied purposes: to open up lived experiences as epistemic spaces and to use the newly produced knowledge to practice political solidarity. I depart from earlier studies (that focused mainly on men) and privilege Dalit and African American womens voices to rethink old and study new contexts of marginalization. I am committed to the reciprocity between scholarship and activism and hence to the dialectical relationship between the scholarly production of knowledge about Dalit and African American women, political activism, and feminist practice and political questions of representation, equality, and solidarity. …

Unpacking Solidarities of the Oppressed: Notes on Trans Struggles in India

Abstract: Thirty-seven years after our black feminist sisters wrote the Combahee River Collective Statement, here I am, a Savarna, middle-class, undocumented trans man in India writing about the possibilities and impossibilities of certain solidarities. I draw strength from the resilient political courage of black sisters like Harriet Tubman and Miss Major, from anticaste leaders like Jotirao and Savitribai Phule and Babasaheb Ambedkar. The questions raised by the Combahee River Collective Statement still resonate with the struggles of black and Dalit sisters, and they have been able to organize themselves through perseverance and stubborn determination, overcoming several attempts at exclusion and co-optation. As a trans man, I write about the structural exclusions, the institutional violence, the individual assaults on dignity and selfhood, the struggle for selfdetermination of gender of my community and what solidarity means to us.In the struggle against class, caste, race, gender, and heterosexist patriarchy, trans people, because of lack of resources and blatant exclusions in existing struggles, seem to be the least politically organized. The individual oppressions of trans persons, of course, vary according to particular positions of class, gender, race, and the geographical area that we occupy, but collectively, trans communities face exclusions of such enormous proportions that most of us find it reason enough to celebrate that we are alive.Trans communities in India are diverse and have local terms of reference that include hijra, thirunangai, kinnar, mangalamukhi, Aravani, kothi, jogappas, shiv shaktis, thirunambis, bhaiyya, and paiyyan. In India, trans women have historically organized themselves into gharanas (houses). There are seven major gharanas spread across India that act as support systems for the hijra community. The guru-chela (mother-daughter) relationship in hijra communities is set up to provide mutual care. Young trans women who face intense familial and public violence in childhood leave their homes and live in hijra houses after choosing their gurus and being accepted by them as chelas. Our trans sisters have admirably organized themselves so they have their own internal legal system called Jamaats, where senior hijras play the role of judges and solve disputes between them. I will be unable to go into a long description of the hijra system for several reasons, among which is the complexity of the system, not easily explained, but more importantly, out of respect for the system as something that is internal to the trans community and that I see no reason to be made more legible to the outside world. It is only to contextualize trans politics and communities in India as radically different from those in the West that I felt the need for this short introduction.Trans women in India live, work, and occupy public space together. This is a strategy for survival arrived upon out of a deep understanding of public violence, discrimination, and vulnerability. Most trans people in India come from poor families (one of the reasons for this may be that trans people who are from economically well-off families might be concerned about inheritance issues and losing out on financial support if they were to assert their gender openly), or if they are not from poor families, they become economically, socially, and politically dispossessed as a result of their trans identity. Dalit trans activist and artist Living Smile Vidya talks about transphobia as a type of brahmanism, with the hijra becoming the untouchable subject. Because of transphobia, even hijras and trans men who come from well-off, Savarna families are unable to pursue theneducation or procure jobs. It is only in Dalit colonies that trans people are able to rent out houses. This might be the result not of an acceptance of our trans identity but rather of the economic necessity of the poorer house owner to rent out his or her house. The fact that there is more visibility of hijras in Dalit colonies has to a certain extent normalized thenpresence, though they are still ridiculed on an everyday basis. …

Pinkwatching Israel, Whitewashing Canada: Queer (Settler) Politics and Indigenous Colonization in Canada

Abstract: Queer organizing against Israel's deployment of gay rights discourses to mask the occupation of Palestine-referred to as "pinkwashing" within academic and activist circles-has raised pertinent questions about the relations between settler colonialism, sexuality, gender, race, and (gay) imperialism Such campaigns have directed attention to the realities of occupation in Palestine/Israel while simultaneously obscuring the historical and present-day colonial processes that enable transnational political intervention on Turtle Island-or what is commonly known as Canada and the United States1 In this essay, we ask how critics of Israeli pinkwashing-known as pinkwatchers-varyingly challenge, engage, negotiate, perform, or reproduce settler colonialism on Indigenous lands We examine debates over the participation of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuALA) in Pride Toronto (Pride) in 2010 and the subsequent formation of the Pride Coalition for Free Speech (PCFS) By focusing on these debates, we seek to critically explore how certain queer praxes have worked to normalize and invisibilize settler colonialism in the Canadian context and to reproduce Canada as a progressive queer-friendly liberal state While our discussion focuses on QuALA, PCFS, and Pride 2010, the objective of our essay is not to single out groups and organizations but to contribute to conversations about the broader political stakes of antiracism, anticolonialism, and decolonization in radical queer organizing These examples serve as the entry point for us to consider in what ways the articulation of "radical queer perspectives" might be complicit with the white settler state project, wherein the casting of Canada as a gay-friendly nation invisibilizes past and ongoing processes of colonialism Our essay suggests that criticism of the use of queer rights and liberal tolerance to justify governmental, industrial, and military actions often works to limit discussions of settler colonialism to places, nations, and peoples who are already invisible within that frame Describing how queer groups naturalize notions of belonging and Canadian identity, as well as how queer critiques of pinkwashing fail to address settler colonialism in Canada, we seek to underscore the way Indigenous struggles for sovereignty are invisibilized in activists' attempts to address issues of free speech, homonationalism, and occupation in Palestine/Israel Where the pinkwashing of Israel has been criticized by queer activists who effectively surveil and organize against, or pinkwatch, such activities, the complicity of their activist efforts with settler colonialism ultimately whitewashes colonization in Canada We argue, therefore, that the pinkwatching of Israel enables the pinkwashing, or rather whitewashing, of CanadaLogics of Pinkwashing/PinkwatchingToronto has played a pivotal role in transnational organizing around Palestinian solidarity and challenging the apartheid state of Israel-with several labor, student, faculty, artist, and community organizations central to this organizing Collectively they have pushed the limits of analyses of solidarity, colonialism, imperialism, race, gender and, increasingly, questions of queerness and sexuality (see, for example, Ravecca and Upadhyay 2013) Through the work of QuAIA, Toronto has come to serve as a key site on the global map in the struggle against Israel's attempts to pinkwash its occupation of Palestine Not only does QuAIA challenge Israeli apartheid, but it also informs queer praxis in Toronto It engages a queer perspective that is intersectional and contextualized by an analysis of colonialism, racism, Islamophobia, and heteropatriarchy QuAIA was formed to work in solidarity with queers in Palestine and Palestine solidarity movements around the world, alongside groups such as Queers in Solidarity with Palestine and Israeli Queers for Palestine The group challenges homophobia in Israel, Palestine, and across all borders …

From Tehran to Los Angeles to Tehran: Transnational Solidarity Politics in the One Million Signatures Campaign to End Discriminatory Law

Abstract: The One Million Signatures Campaign to End Discriminatory Law began in Iran in 2006, after two years of crackdowns by hard-liners within the government.1 As public protests for changes in womens rights vis-a-vis family law became less possible, activists began a new strategy to raise awareness about womens compromised legal status and to bring about reforms in family law.The goals of the campaign were initially to collect one million signatures through door-to-door direct contact, gatherings, and the Internet "in support of changes to discriminatory laws against women" and to promote dialogue and discussion among women and men in meetings and public seminars and conferences (Change for Equality 2006). The collection of signatures was the first phase of the campaign; in the second phase, campaign activists hope to work with supportive legal experts to draft new legislation to replace unjust laws. The laws they seek to challenge are mostly family laws pertaining to custody, marriage, inheritance, and divorce, among other issues.While the campaign uses novel tactics, like street theater and door-todoor petitioning, womens political participation in Iran has a long history. As scholars (Afary 1996; Paidar 1995) have argued, women were key players in the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-11, shaping a national struggle to reform the corrupt Qajar dynasty (1796-1925) and organizing a womens movement with more long-term goals of emancipation. The Pahlavi era (1925-79) saw the state-building project as intertwined with questions of gender and womens status (Najmabadi 1998; Paidar 1995). As Paidar asserts, the project of modern statehood was a coercive one, and many reforms for women, such as compulsory unveiling, in 1936, were instituted violently. Moreover, as Najmabadi (1998) argues, the constitutional period and the era of the Pahlavis each enabled and constrained womens possibilities, through the regulation of womens bodies and gendered ideologies.The shah's top-down implementation of political change included limited reforms in health, fertility, and education that benefited primarily middleand upper-class women. By 1976, the literacy rate among rural women was only 16.5 percent, a mere 15 percent increase over twenty years (Paidar 1995,162). Even for middleand upper-class women, ideas about the patriarchal control of women in the family remained dominant. By the late 1970s, deep resentment of the shah's modernizing program, which was not only coercive but also shut out vast sectors of society, had infiltrated many corners of Iran.The 1979 revolution was a broad-based oppositional movement against the corrupt dictatorship of the shah, and its ideological theorists mobilized a discourse of gender equality that gave women a key role in the revolution and postrevolutionary society. Ali Shari'ati, the popular leftist Islamic theorist of the revolution, gave frequent lectures based on his book Fatima Is Fatima. Drawing on the founding period of Islam, Shari'ati argued that women should emulate Fatima, the prophet Muhammad's daughter, who was "the center of a family of fighters. She took on responsibilities and became socially engaged, equally to men but in a different way" (quoted in Keddie 2003,205). As Keddie argues, Shari'ati formulated this "separate but equal" doctrine as an antidote to the West's notion of a liberated woman, hyperindividualistic and sexually objectified, but also in response to women's seclusion within patriarchal notions of Islam. In this sense, he appealed to national anti-imperialist sentiments that ran deep during the reign of the shah (205). Like Shari'ati, but from a conservative or traditionalist perspective, Ayatollah Khomeini argued for women's freedom within Islam. He asserted, "As for women, Islam has never been against their freedom. It is, to the contrary, opposed to the idea of womanas-object and it gives her back her dignity" (qtd. in Sanasarian 1982,117). Khomeini, too, drew on a growing critique of "Westoxification," the consumerist, sexually exploitative, and individualist trends thought to be promoted by the West. …

"Even a Freak Like You Would Be Safe in Tel Aviv": Transgender Subjects, Wounded Attachments, and the Zionist Economy of Gratitude

Abstract: what are you?? if your not a male or a female, perhaps something in between?? then can you explain to me your ridiculous & ignorant hate against the only country in the Middle-East that someone like you could live a peaceful life, almost without prejudice, having the law on your side, and also having the same rights as a male or female heterosexual??? because darling, someone like you would be strung up byyr pigtails and stoned to death, tortured or imprisoned, in any of those "peace loving" "democratic" non-judgemental" [sic] Muslim countries that surround Israel!!-YouTube comment directed at meThere is something about anger that is akin to this gift exchange. Once anger is given to you, it is passed along as quickly as possible There in the street, as the army fired over our heads, but abo at us, the first impulse was to return the gift of death straight back to the original donor, with no lapse in time. But, in that case, you would be killed. So you pass it along, and it just leaps out, somewhere ebe and at another timeThere were a lot of people who returned to their everyday life unable to control their anger, and exploded into senseless rage at the slightest trifles for months afterwards.-Alan Klima, The Funeral Casino: Meditation, Massacre, and Exchange with the Dead in ThailandIn 2007, the Israeli foreign ministry officially launched a campaign called Brand Israel. With professional corporate PR firms hired to revitalize the apartheid states international image, a total of almost $20 million was set aside for Israeli state propaganda in that year alone.1 This rebranding campaign, which persists today, has consisted of multiple different tactics. The tactic that has received perhaps the most attention, and the one with which I am the most concerned here, is what has been dubbed by Palestine solidarity activists as "pinkwashing" (Schulman 2011). Haneen Maikey, cofounder of the queer Palestinian organization Al Qaws, defines pinkwashing as "the cynical use of gay rights by the Israeli government... in order to divert attention from Israeli... occupation and apartheid, by promoting itself as a progressive country that respects gay rights, and, on the contrary, portraying Palestinian society and Palestinians as homophobic" (Maikey 2013). Jasbir Puar (2007) coined the term "homonationalism" to refer to this process. Since the launch of Brand Israel, there has been a proliferation of activist organizing around pinkwashing. In 2013, much of this activist and academic work culminated in a conference, titled "Homonationalism and Pinkwashing," held at the City University of New York Graduate Center in April 2013. Both Maikey and Puar were keynote speakers at this conference.While much of this work so far has focused on the cynical deployment of cisgender queer subjectivities, the question I want to pose, then, is where, in the age of neoliberalism and homonationalism, is the transgender subject relative to colonial economies of gratitude? Ironically, to the extent to which this question is beginning to be addressed within the academy, responses to pinkwashing as it relates to transgender subjectivities and politics have followed the gradual "inclusion" of transgender subjects into homonationalism. During her keynote speech at the conference, Jasbir Puar raised the question of a rise, in recent years, of a trans version of homonationalism, citing the example of U.S. vice president Joseph Biden's statement that transgender issues are "the civil rights issue of our time." A question I raised to Puar during the Q&A session, and one that remains an issue, is the question of the incitement to discourse-the "call and response" that Puar describes between pinkwashing and the queer response to pinkwashing. Is this the moment, now, when transgender subjectivities can be discussed in relationship to pinkwashing and homonationalism? Did transgender subjects have to wait to be invoked by Joseph Biden into another wave of homonationalism before we could theorize our relationship to it? …

Arrested Solidarity: Obstacles to Intermovement Support for LGBT Rights in Malawi

Abstract: Gender and sexual diversity organizing is on the rise throughout Africa. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activist organizations contest social, political, and religious opprobrium toward homosexuality and gender nonconformity in different African nations (Epprecht 2013), including but not limited to Cameroon (Awondo 2010), Kenya (Dearham 2013), Namibia (Currier 2012), Nigeria (Obadare 2013), South Africa (Currier 2012), and Uganda (Ssebaggala 2011). LGBT activist organizations in some African nations operate independently of other minority rights movements. As political homophobia intensifies in some countries, LGBT activist organizations may depend more on solidarity partnerships with sympathizers. Partnerships can provide LGBT activist organizations with financial assistance, moral support, and contacts for additional supporters.Although some feminist theorists extol solidarity partnerships as having the potential to actualize social justice goals (Mohanty 2003), in reality, solidarity partnerships between activist organizations can be messy and unpredictable (Hodzic 2014). LGBT rights defenders in countries like Malawi might need allies, but potential partners may be unable to extend this support for different reasons. Despite the apparent political symmetry between HIV/AIDS, human rights, LGBT, and feminist movements, activists' concerns do not align so neatly, making Malawi an excellent case study for analyzing the fragile process that produces intermovement solidarity. In this essay, I outline obstacles that interrupt or block intermovement solidarity for LGBT rights in Malawi to demonstrate how activists work to craft solidarity and how they understand obstructions to solidar- ity for LGBT rights. Understanding solidarity as a process is especially important as observers around the world propose ways to halt political homophobia.Cultural and political antipathy toward gender and sexual dissidence in different African countries renders isolated organizations that defend LGBT rights vulnerable to criticism and persecution (Currier 2012). In response, organizations that defend LGBT rights may forge solidarity partnerships with friendly, local social movements and transnational NGOs that pressure social, political, and religious actors to respect gender and sexual dissidents and LGBT rights. Although organizations may concurrently cultivate horizontal solidarity partnerships with local social movements and vertical solidarity partnerships with foreign donors and transnational NGOs, these partnerships yield different outcomes for LGBT rights organizations. Local social movements may not be able to offer the financial assistance foreign donors and transnational NGOs can, but they can lend nonmaterial support and mobilize their activist networks to advance LGBT rights. Activists' personal prejudices can also generate obstacles for organizations' support for LGBT rights. Foreign donors and transnational NGOs may expect their investments in organizations that defend LGBT rights to achieve certain outcomes, such as measurable progress on LGBT rights.The collaborative solidarity on which Malawian LGBT rights defenders depend is not guaranteed. In this essay, I explore the contours of LGBT rights solidarity in Malawi, a country in which political homophobia coalesced in 2010 when the government prosecuted Tiwonge Chimbalanga, a transgender woman, and Steven Monjeza, a cisgender man, for violating antisodomy statutes (Somanje 2009). Since 2010, homophobia has saturated national politics. In this environment, some HIV/AIDS, human rights, and feminist activists limited the support they expressed publicly for LGBT rights.To understand obstacles to intermovement solidarity for LGBT rights, I first discuss the codification of heteronormativity in the transition from British colonial rule to postcolonial sovereignty and the emergence of political homophobia in Malawi. The recent deployment of political homophobia generated high costs for HIV/AIDS, human rights, and feminist activists who were pondering whether, when, and how to show their support for LGBT rights. …

Global Health: The Debts of Gratitude

Abstract: It permits us always to say: "Careful, you think there is gift, dissymmetry, generosity, expenditure, or loss, but the circle of debt, of exchange, or of symbolic equilibrium reconstitutes itself according to the laws of the unconscious; the generous' or 'grateful' consciousness is only the phenomenon of a calculation and the ruse of an economy. Calculation and ruse, economy in truth would be the truth of these phenomena."Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit MoneyIn early April 2013, Madonna's ongoing troubles with Malawi boiled over in a spat with President Joyce Banda that aired across the Internet (Gumede 2013; Ross 2013). Without delving into the disputed details of Madonna's pitfalls trying to "do good" (Fisher 1997) in the country, it is worth repeating a small part of the lengthy statement released by President Banda's office as Madonna departed Malawi in a flurry of complaints, her public relations team still sparring with critics (Ross 2013). The statement, which President Banda later said she had neither seen nor approved, nevertheless resonated so powerfully with many in the country that few expected a retraction (Harding 2013; "Joyce Banda Disowns" 2013). An early section reads: "Granted, Madonna has adopted two children from Malawi. According to the record, this gesture was humanitarian and of her accord. It, therefore, comes across as strange and depressing that for a humanitarian act, prompted only by her, Madonna wants Malawi to be forever chained to the obligation of gratitude. Kindness, as far as its ordinary meaning is concerned, is free and anonymous. If it can't be free and silent, it is not kindness; it is something else. Blackmail is the closest it becomes" (Ross 2013).To focus solely on Madonnas sense of entitlement or her misbehavior here is to miss the larger source of Malawians' anger and take all-too-easy aim at the pitfalls of celebrity philanthropy. African leaders and their citizens are no strangers to the "obligation of gratitude" incurred while at the receiving end of philanthrocapitalism, development schemes, or humanitarian aid. Even the most elementary student of theories of exchange will remind us that no gift is merely a symbol of generosity but is embedded in complex relations of hierarchy and expectations of reciprocity (see Derrida 1992; Graeber 2001; Mauss 1990). The language of "obligation" and "blackmail" reflects the ways in which "gifts" become debts, and charity creates subtle forms of peonage. What is notable in this incident-and indeed, vaguely titillating for critical Western observers-is that Banda steps so boldly outside her role in the contrived theater of aid recipiency.Even on the eve of African independence, however, Frantz Fanon (1963) unmasked the dangers of colonial charity:And when we hear the head of a European nation declare with hand on heart that he must come to the aid of the unfortunate peoples of the underdeveloped world, we do not tremble with gratitude. On the contrary, we say among ourselves, "it's a just reparation we are getting." So we will not accept aid for the underdeveloped countries as "charity." Such aid mustbe considered the final stage of a dual consciousness-the consciousness of the colonized that it is their due and the consciousness of the capitalist powers that effectively they must pay up (59; emphasis in the original).Fanon reframes the seeming generosity of the developed nations as material and psychological reparations. Here, the final step toward liberation requires a psychological shift, in which the mystifications of charity fall away, and what is given becomes what is owed.The perceptual shift Fanon once anticipated seems long forgotten, buried under layer upon layer of initiatives for the betterment of the Global South. More recently, the vast expansion of global health programs has provided a new platform for the mystifications of donation, aid, and generosity. Although many recent critiques of global health endeavors have emphasized their unintended costs, and the exacerbations of inequalities and hierarchies they can elicit (see, for example, Benatar 2005; Crane 2011, 2013; Lewis 2007; Swidler 2009), a more explicit focus on debt may help us to fully grapple with the obligations and disenfranchisements that continue to arise despite the good intentions, "best practices," and humanitarian ideals of global health enterprises (Bornstein and Redfield 2011; Elyachar 2006). …

Feminisms and the Social Media Sphere

Abstract: I have maintained a coherent journal of my daily thoughts ever since I was eleven. Before that, there was the notorious "secret diary" that was never as much a secret as it was a source of entertainment for my elders. The diary dealt with what Anais Nin called the "immediate present." It involved gathering my immediate thoughts about lived experiences, which revealed the power of reaction that remained in a little girl's sensibilities instead of verbose critical perception. Writing had not been a conversation until I began blogging. There was little to no concern for visibility until, in my late teens, I used social media. After that, writing became hypervisible and often took the form of a clash of opinions between me and my readers. Depending on the context of the posts, it was a curse or a blessing, but more than that, it was a constant dialogue.By the time I was in my late teens and had moved to the bustling heart of Lahore from a rather small city, I began blogging with no specific purpose in my mind; for me, it was simply to store my thoughts. After several posts, I gained popularity among the Pakistani blogging world for a post that humorously described the sociocultural meanings behind the certain ways Pakistani women don the dupatta. Several journalists found it hilarious and my blog was listed as one of the top blogs in Guernica magazine's "A Year in Digital Discoveries in 2010" (Khan 2010), in which the categories were "gender," "South Asia," and "Islam."My history of slowly amassing thousands of readers and followers on social media is imperative for me to mention so that the chronology of my political blogging and the change of tone in my online presence becomes evident. After I established my voice as a Pakistani blogger, a political real- ity surfaced and became uncomfortably obvious: nonwhite voices, particularly Muslim and female, were treated and received as anthropological projects but rarely as sources of personal musings, in comparison to the kind of treatment white female bloggers received. There was always, and sadly perhaps always will be, a certain kind of Orientalist fascination that brown Muslim bloggers invoked in their global audiences. There was no escaping it.In addition to the veils-and-harems image seeming to be evoked every single time a Muslim woman, such as myself, blogged, the deep hostility that many Western neoconservatives and even liberals held for Muslim women and their online presence was a source of constant harassment and undeserved animosity. Added to that bitter concoction was the presence of sexist bloggers-the majority of whom are male-who used all sorts of narratives to shut Muslim women bloggers down. In several unfortunate cases of harassment, Muslim women chose to give up their social media presence; but the support they received from their readers showed that they had garnered a network of solidarity and unity-regardless of the profiles of their readers.For marginalized voices in social media spaces, solidarity becomes essential. With the increasingly dense and confusing landscape of communication spreading throughout the world, various political-activist groups are attempting to gain more access to information as well as more opportunities to engage in public speech. The power of social media, in this context, lies primarily in its support for civil society and social justice. It is through the tools of social media that a group of bloggers, including myself, coordinated our political voices and demands. The diversity of our network was undeniable and politically significant; Arab, South Asian, and African American bloggers and others coordinated their voices and highlighted political and social issues before their own audiences. Regardless of the outcome (or lack of it), these networks still exist and continue to raise voices for each other on a plethora of issues. One can describe this as transnational solidarity in online spaces.Before further elaborating on the necessity of the counternarratives generated by solidarity in social media, I would like share the work our group of bloggers and activists rendered online on several issues. …

Speculative Technologies: Debt, Love, and Divination in a Transnationalizing Market

Abstract: Four young women with love on their mind are waiting to learn about their future. It's a summer afternoon in a neighborhood of Tuzla, a city in northeastern Bosnia. The waiting room is filled with old sofas, well loved and bent out of shape by a history of bodies getting comfortable, and the table in the middle is crowded with cups, upturned messily and leaking coffee tails. The mood is as inviting as the open seats: expectant, pleasur - able, excited by the stories women share of previous visits. New arrivals are instructed on what to expect. One by one, women take their dry coffee cups to Zlata in the adjacent room. Coffee mud has painted the insides of turned cups with an intricate, biographically significant landscape, but Zlata apparently "reads" beyond the phenomenal, grasping what Jacques Derrida calls the very "possibility of an event dawning" (2005, 3). Coffee mud is an appropriately murky medium for grasping what is not (yet), whatever may come to be under the circumstances of habitual uncertainty. The women are living in a precarious, transforming economy, where the market has been exploding since the end of socialism and the 1990s war, drawing masses into the business of trade and consumption. Thus inflated, the economy has been weathering a prolonged shortage of capital since the turn of the millennium. The popular market economy— everyday household provisioning and small entrepreneurship—is sus- tained by debt: informal lending and borrowing between intimates, kin, and clients and formal bank and microcredit loans. The clientele of Zlata, a coffee cup reader with a fabulous reputation for accuracy and reason - able price, however, are primarily concerned with forecasts for love affairs, illicit passions, urgent or wilting desires, marriage prospects, and such. A

Gendered Transactions: Identity and Payment at Midcentury

Abstract: According to company lore, the idea for Diners' Club1, the first "universal charge card," emerged in 1949 when FrankX. McNamara, aNew York City businessman, was dining out with a client and realized that he had forgotten his wallet at home. He was able to sneak to off to call his wife, who drove in from Long Island "with cash in her pocket and a hot look in her eye" (and, in some accounts, "curlers in her hair") so that he could pay for the meal and avoid embarrassment and potential loss of business (Sutton 1958). While he waited, the story goes, McNamara decided that this sort of thing should never happen again, that any "responsible businessman" should be able to sign a tab for a restaurant everywhere (Linehan 1956).The Diners' Club origin story is powerful, often repeated, and probably apocryphal (Simmons 1995). But like most good marketing myths, it demonstrates the imaginary from which Diners' Club emerged: who the founders thought their consumers were and what their needs and aspirations might be. Even if McNamara never left his wallet at home, the tale reveals the context that animated the Diners' Club card. The commuting businessman, the expense account dinner, and the suburb and the housewife in it were all interrelated midcentury American inventions, and the charge card, like the highway that the unnamed Mrs. McNamara drove in on, became an infrastructure that helped make them possible.To understand this infrastructure, it is crucial to know that the Diners' Club card was not, as it is sometimes described, the first credit card. Although the terms were sometimes used interchangeably, the Diners' Club card was not a credit card but a charge card. In fact, it preceded the credit card by at least fifteen years. Unlike later, true credit cards, the Diners' Club card was not tied to an account of revolving credit. It did not allow members to carry a balance, and it charged yearly membership fees instead of interest. For the first few decades, most of its revenue came from merchant fees.It has been quite convincingly argued that consumer debt has been, and continues to be, a powerful social force in American life (see, for example, Mandell 1990; Cohen 2003; Nocera 1995; Martin 2002; Hyman 2011). Very little attention, however, has been given to payment infrastructures themselves, that, in fact, are not always tied to debt. This essay foregrounds payment as distinct from, but in relation to, debt. Payment systems, as Bill Maurer (2012b) puts it, are the "plumbing" of modern economies.2 Attending to debt alone misses the pipes for the water that flows through them. Furthermore, studying the history of payment systems such as the Diners' Club card is essential for encountering new and emergent payment systems, which increasing rely less on debt and more on other revenue models, notably those that trade on the value of identity in the form of personal transactional data.Payment is always already a vector of identity. It is a tool used to perform and determine identity. It is one of what Michel Foucault (1998) called "technologies of the self," those techniques through which "selves" are performed and policed according to available discourses. The way people pay marks them and marks the nature of their economic agency in everyday life. Particular payment instruments construct particular social relations. Georg Simmel (1900), for example, argued that modern money-which can be understood, in this sense, as a payment instrument-made people strangers, but it also made it possible to interact, trust, and pay as strangers. Like national currencies, payment forms define territories and foster within them a "common economic language with which to communicate" (Helleiner 1998,1414).Crucially, payment tools produce difference. Paying with a jar of pennies or a debit card that benefits the Sierra Club or a large wad of cash or a black American Express Centurion each produces distinction and meaning. This process is reciprocal: payment forms are marked by those who use them and also by the context in which they are used. …

An Honest Day's Wage for a Dishonest Day's Work: (Re)Productivism and Refusal

Abstract: Thirty years after publishing the pivotal "Wages Against Housework," Silvia Federici revisited reproductive labor and its central role in the "unfinished feminist revolution": "The concept of'reproductive labor'recognizes the possibility of crucial alliances and forms of cooperation between producers and the reproduced: mothers and children, teachers and students, nurses and patients" (2008, 100). The Wages for Housework movement focused on establishing reproductive work as work and demanding a wage for it in hopes of making the family on which capital relies so uneconomical as to bring the system to its knees (Federici 1975). An additional legacy of the movement for anticapitalist feminism remains the celebration of cross-class alliances between those served and those serving. I argue that Wages for Housework is remarkable both for the militancy of its approach to reproductive labor's organization under capital and the conservatism of its approach to the reproductive work ethic. We would be ill-equipped to resist the violence of late capitalism without a framework with which to understand unrecognized and unwaged work as work. However, the ethic of alliance positions workers precariously in relation to the blackmail of what I term the "social necessity debt," a configuration in which workers are evaluated based on the perceived necessity of their work to the reproduction of society. This perceived value is in turn mobilized against workers as the reason they cannot refuse work. Teaching and health care are therefore valued more highly than retail work, for example, but a teacher's or nurse's refusing work tasks or walking out midshift is assigned an ethical debt retail workers have not as yet been asked to confront. Capital extracts ethical responsibility from workers, much like labor itself. By positing a vision of community in which our interests are necessarily aligned with those of the people we serve, we enable that extraction.In this spirit, I critique what I term "(re)productivism," an attitude toward reproductive labor that assumes that social reproduction is selfevidently good and necessary and subordinates disruptive desires and practices to its dictates. This both draws from and complicates autonomist Marxist critiques of productivism as a framework in which "the richness, spontaneity, and plurality of social practices and relations are subordinated to the instrumental and rationalist logic of productivity" (Weeks 2011, 81). That autonomists directed their critique of productivism at both capitalist and orthodox Marxist visions of social organization is key to my argument. Like socialism informed by Marxist orthodoxy, anticapitalist feminism and the Wages for Housework movement emphasize control over labor's structure and organization rather than its ethics. Extending the push from autonomist industrial workers who "didn't want control; they wanted out" (Cleaver 2000, 17), I am concerned with reproductive labor and its ethics, including but not only as they exist under capitalism.Nearly forty years after Wages for Housework's inception, the problematics the movement identified with reproductive labor-the "blackmail whereby our need to give and receive affection is turned against us as a work duty," unclear boundaries between work and nonwork, contingency, isolation, and low pay-are paradigmatic of work that reaches far outside the home (Federici 1975, 20). Marxist feminist scholars have explored the "feminization of work," where "feminization" means both an increasing proportion of women in the labor market and the trend in which capital increasingly calls upon the affects, activities, and conditions associated with women's reproductive labor in all forms of work (Morini 2007). Working from this latter definition of feminization, I explore the corresponding feminization of symbolic debt, whereby more and more workers get saddled with the syrupy affects that have traditionally helped capital to extract the maximum reproductive labor from women. …

Solidarity, Sexuality, and Saving Muslim Women in Neoliberal Times

Abstract: Desiring SolidaritySolidarity is a fundamental-even constitutive-concern of feminist theory and politics. Like a specter it haunts feminist imaginations periodically. Yet it is a slippery term. Certain expressions of feminist solidarity, we know, often gloss over divisions in the name of unity. The pursuit of solidarity along these registers, I suggest, expresses a longing as much as it represents a political goal.1 Perhaps this desire (for home? for the transcendence of privilege and so a point of arrival?) explains the persistence or at least periodic revival of a language of sisterhood that is otherwise discredited.The trope of global sisterhood is especially powerful today; its affective power allows for its reinvention in different idioms at different times. Most recently, neoliberal discursive regimes in Euro-America have revived both global sisterhood and a politics of salvation/caring, deftly folding them into corporate marketing strategies. So it is that, for instance, the Whole Foods grocery store chain solicits donations for its microcredit programs for women "in the developing world," as part of its stated mission to produce a "future without poverty." In the same vein, the French luxury cosmetics company Clarins's FEED 15 campaign, as an expression of its "humanitarian values," provides meals to hungry children worldwide through the World Food Program.2 Both ventures appeal, in different ways, to a global cosmopolitan feminist sentiment located in the North. By implication, the present of women and children in Europe and the United States excludes poverty and hunger.3In this short essay, I am mainly interested in the discourses of solidarity and sisterhood opened up by the collapse of Rana Plaza in Savar, Bangladesh, in 2013, in which over eleven hundred garment factory workers were killed. Not surprisingly, First World solidarity with Third World workers figured centrally in the coverage following the disaster. As horrifying images of the "tragedy" and its aftermath circulated across global media, the incident was rendered a spectacle for consumption. Like other such events, it was open to the most incendiary mobilizations.The new "socially conscious" Pope Francis immediately denounced as slave labor the working conditions in Bangladeshi garment factories ("Bangladesh 'Slave Labor'" 2013). A year later, at a conference convened by the International Labor Rights Forum called "Women's Rights in the Apparel Industry: Ending Violence, Empowering Voices," a participant declared, "We want to take these women out of slavery." The head of the National Organization for Women, in a rousing speech, also condemned as slave labor factory work in places like Bangladesh and Honduras.It is not my intention to caricature individuals or impugn their motives. I do not doubt the sincerity of individual concerns, feminist or otherwise. My interest rather is in the work of the trope of slavery. Like trafficking and forced labor, slavery performs a specific discursive-ideological function. Its persuasive power lies in representing "extremes" such as the Rana Plaza collapse as being outside the legitimate liberal capitalist system rather than constitutive of the system itself.In contrast to such incendiary calls to solidarity, a more informed and nuanced transnational activism around "sweatshop" labor foregrounds the essential complicity of Northern corporations and Bangladeshi capitalists in the making of incidents such as the Rana Plaza collapse. This is critical terrain, in which labor activists in Bangladesh work side by side with activists in the United States.4 For the most part, however, antisweatshop campaigns hinge on the power of the affluent Northern consumer to "save" poor Third World women through the former's ethical consumption practices. Solidarity is decidedly vertical.The Marketplace of SolidarityAs indicated earlier, feminist solidarity of a neoliberal kind has been marketized in the global economy. …

Debt and Its Social Entrapments

Abstract: Between 1997 and 2012, nearly two hundred thousand agriculturists committed suicide in India.1 Most official reports, studies, and testimonials considered indebtedness and the burdens of debt defaulting to be the key reasons for such distress.2 Yet indebtedness is not just an economic factor but also a social condition that marks the life-worlds of victims and their families. Debt, as part of the capitalization of agriculture and rural economies, is a signal aspect of the circuits of capital and is promoted as an inevitable process of economic growth and productivity. Even as debt forges new relationships between creditors and debtors, it generates a cultural grammar in which "repayment," "interest," "mortgage," "deferment," "reclaim," "seizure," and so on become part of the lexicon of the everyday life of debtors. In the telling words of Margaret Atwood, debt as a "human construct mirrors and magnifies both voracious human desire and ferocious human fear" (2008,2). And in the life-worlds of marginal agriculturists, whose already tenuous economic position is made more vulnerable by debt, the entrapments of indebtedness become the final straw that destroys their very reason for living.The increasing integration of agriculturists into the market economy has led to reordering the cultural basis of Indian agriculture.3 Although it is well known and an established fact that the agrarian system has long been hierarchical, with caste-based allocation of rights over land and its resources, regional agricultural practices were conducted on a pattern of collectively shared knowledge forms and rhythms. Such agricultural patterns were also marked by shared agricultural knowledge and linked to local cultural patterns.4 Regional or agro-ecology-specific agriculture was based on a society-nature relationship in which society relied on a corpus of collective knowledge to appropriate nature within a range of hierarchical social and economic structures and relationships. While the structure of social activities was itself linked to the ecological and agricultural cycles, the key idioms and terms of cultural life were drawn from and linked to agricultural activities.5 Even as agriculture was based on differential rights and status, it provided a larger collective identity to a range of people who performed different functions in its processes. In addition, as studies (Amin 1982; Breman 2007) have elaborated, agriculture in India drew on a network of relationships in which cooperation and extension of assistance for a range of activities formed part of the production processes themselves.But the changes induced by the capitalization of agriculture and the retained caste-based social bases of production have altered this collective orientation and exacerbated the multiple risks that most agriculturists face.6 This is particularly so for marginal agriculturists whose precarious economic position is worsened by the risks of the new capitalist order. As marginal cultivators, their position in the local and macro economy is one of marginality, not merely from their ownership or cultivation of limited plots and sizes of land (with an average of only 1.33 hectares per cultivating household) but also from the marginal political and social position they occupy in the immediate and larger political economies of the nation. What Sanyal (2007) and Akhram-Lodhi and Kay (2009) identify as markers of marginality is valid for all the households that experienced suicides. These markers include not only access to or ownership of limited landholding, but marginal cultivators also suffer from insecurity of ownership and tenancy, produce for both consumption and sale, are structurally situated in conditions where the surplus production is often transferred to dominant classes, and are subject to processes of semi-proletarianization and pauperization. Additionally, most marginal cultivators are also from the lower-ranked jatis and hence lack the social and cultural capital to emerge as successful or entrepreneurial agriculturists. …

The Road from Antipinkwashing Activism to the Decolonization of Palestine

Abstract: The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) articulates a firm stand against sexism in movements for Black liberation and racism in white womens movements in the United States. It is a compelling and inspiring call by Black feminists to dismantle interlocking sociopolitical and economic systems of oppression, namely capitalism, imperialism, racism, and patriarchy. The statement reflects a tense political moment in which a set of principles for consciousness-raising and political engagement are discerned for the sake of the liberation of all oppressed people. Oppressions experienced by Black women, and lesbians in particular, are centered in the statement, especially, says the Combahee River Collective, as "the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else s oppression." Now, more than four decades later, anchoring one's political work in personal and collective experiences of oppression is as relevant and meaningful.In our own organizing toward the decolonization of Palestine, and with the rise of antipinkwashing activism, both nationalist and identity-based forms of political organizing have continually been questioned and contested for their inherent limitations in forging strong coalitional politics. After all, antipinkwashing activism did not emerge within a vacuum but as a response to Israel's use of gay culture and rights to distract from and normalize Israeli occupation, settler colonialism, and apartheid. It is at the intersection of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer movements and the Palestine solidarity movement. Before antipinkwashing, these two movements had rarely been perceived as ones that could potentially connect or interact. As a result of this binary understanding, antipinkwashing has been formulated as a new form of organizing, a new tactic, aimed to reform both movements: adding a bit of "solidarity" to LGBT movements and a little "gayness" to Palestine solidarity work. But is the task of antipinkwashing activism to politicize LGBT movements, or is antipinkwashing an attempt to queer up Palestine solidarity movements? In other words, does antipinkwashing have the potential to expand beyond these limitations and become, not a reformist, but a radically transformative strategy?Nearly four years have passed since the launch of antipinkwashing campaigns the world over. Since then, we've seen pro-Israel organizations counterattack with much anticipated allegations of anti-Semitism and racism, we've witnessed organized efforts against Israeli pinkwashing from an antiwar/antiracism lens, and we've also taken note that many LGBT activists and groups have integrated antipinkwashing within the framework of international gay solidarity activism. Aside from Palestinian Queers for BDS (pqbds.com) and alQaws (alqaws.org), both in Palestine, and a network of Arab activists, mainly through Pinkwatching Israel (pinkwatchingisrael.com), most initiatives have sprung within the global North. Antipinkwashing activism has rapidly become a striking and tense embodiment of all the questions that could emerge (or rather erupt) from the nexus of sexualized, gendered, and racialized politics within a modern gay transnational solidarity movement.In light of emerging politics of solidarity and our inherently different positionalities, would it be useful to assume that everyone in this movement is here for the same reasons and is fighting for the same cause? Does "gayness" charge our activism, and if yes, toward what, and how? The Combahee River Collective Statement, for example, contextualizes and centers Black lesbian sexuality within wider movements in order to disrupt the heterosexism, racism, and economic oppressions circulating in those movements. Sexual orientations, however, in their contemporary depoliticized and neoliberal forms, cannot but narrow and limit antipinkwashing as a transnational solidarity movement. …

"Women Can Do Anything Men Can Do": Gender and the Affects of Solidarity in the U.S. Iranian Student Movement, 1961–1979

Abstract: ����� ��� The gender politics of anticolonial revolutions, and the new nation-states that emerged in their wake, have been at the center of postcolonial and transnational feminist critiques of nationalism and patriarchy. While significant scholarship exists on women and the Iranian Revolution, scant attention has thus far been paid to the position of women in the diasporic wing of the revolutionary movement—whether to the prevailing theories of women’s oppression and liberation or to how those theories shaped the lived experiences of the women and men involved. From 1961 to 1979, while the United States flooded Iran with military and economic aid—and Iran became a stalwart defender of U.S. interests in the region—the Confederation of Iranian Students National Union (CISNU) organized thousands of Iranian foreign students throughout Europe and North America to undermine this “special relationship.” According to historian Afshin Matin-asgari, the Confederation was “the most active and persistent force of opposition to the Shah’s regime during the two decades prior to the 1978–79 Revolution” (2002, 1). CISNU’s U.S. affiliate, the Iranian Students Association (ISA), grew in tandem with the overall increase in the foreign student population, and anti-Shah sentiment became dominant even among those students who did not formally join the organization. 1 ISA chapters sprang up wherever Iranian students were enrolled, with the largest and most active located in northern and southern California, Texas/Oklahoma, Washington, DC, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Chicago. Several thousand students participated in ISA demonstrations and annual conventions, while hundreds devoted themselves “full time” to building the movement. 2 For

Beloved Citizens: Toni Morrison's Beloved, Racial Inequality, and American Public Policy

Abstract: Toni Morrison's classic novel Beloved (1987) provides a lens through which to examine how social assistance shapes African American freedom. One dominant interpretation of the novel has been that it implicitly argues for the importance of recognizing the historical legacies of slavery upon African American lives. For example, James Berger claims that the novel counters 1980s ne ©conservative arguments of black cultural pathology by showing that "law and science, power and official knowledge continue to violate African American lives" ( 1996,411). And George Shulman argues that the novel shows that addressing the historical legacies of racial exclusion must be an ongoing rather than temporary process, giving readers "the feeling of urgency and political necessity of a redemption people must seek but cannot guarantee, must not preclude but cannot possess" (2008, 202). These scholars point to the novel's central narrative, which depicts a postbellum community of ex-slaves in Cincinnati grappling with the traumatic legacy of slavery as it is embodied in an infant ghost named Beloved, who was murdered by her mother, Sethe, in an effort to save the child from enslavement.What remains unexplored is how another narrative thread, in which the characters struggle to create a flourishing community during Reconstruction with few economic resources or opportunities, examines the effect of divergent models of social assistance on African American lives. As a work of literature rather than of political theory, Beloved does not provide direct arguments about politics. Furthermore, it does not directly advocate for certain public policies. But I suggest that it nonetheless examines how social assistance that is contingent upon work and adherence to normative moral standards reinforces African American marginalization, whereas unconditional social assistance has a greater potential to mitigate it. The novel thus offers important insights into the politics of debt: conditional social assistance is a further extension of the legacy of slavery because it makes African Americans indebted to American society for whatever aid they receive-aid often needed because of social conditions created by slavery. In contrast, the novel shows how unconditional social assistance, which imposes no debt upon recipients, can more effectively address the legacy of racial oppression. Over a quarter century after Beloved's publication, these observations are valuable for conceptualizing the relationship between contemporary public assistance programs and racial inequality in the United States.It is through the character of Edward Bodwin, a white former abolitionist, that Morrison most obviously dramatizes how conditional social assistance exacerbates African American marginalization. There is good reason to accept Berger's claim that Bodwin represents a tradition of postwar white liberalism that condescends toward African Americans, while providing them with jobs and housing (1996, 417). Berger suggests that Sethe's attack upon Bodwin at the novel's conclusion represents Morrison's repudiation of white liberal paternalism and her simultaneous acknowledgment that liberals' historic commitment to assisting African Americans nonetheless deserves respect. But a closer reading reveals that Morrison actually links Bodwin's assistance to his paternalistic attitude. What she shows is that his assistance actually tethers aid to work, available to recipients only on the condition that individuals adhere to moral standards of conduct that he defines. For these characters to receive assistance to help meet their most basic needs, Bodwin keeps them entirely dependent upon his authority and low-wage labor.Morrison illustrates that Bodwin's type of aid effectively reproduces African American economic marginalization. Whereas Suggs performs certain domestic tasks for Bodwin in exchange for financial support, tasks such as cobbling, canning, and laundry and seamstress work, she dies with few assets and, on her deathbed, describes herself as nothing but "a nigger woman hauling shoes" (Morrison 1987, 179). …

Twenty-First-Century Debt Collectors: Idle No More Combats a Five-Hundred-Year-Old Debt

Abstract: Self-determination. Survival. Sovereignty. These are the principles driving the Idle No More movement and the ideas that have consistently driven Indigenous peoples in North America to fight against their colonizers' destructive designs on their bodies, lands, and spirits. From the genocidal actions of Manifest Destiny and residential boarding schools to Sand Creek, Wounded Knee, and reservations, the governments of the United States and Canada have persistently colonized the Indigenous peoples of this continent in word and deed. Idle No More is an ongoing grassroots effort created by four First Nations women in Canada that has attracted global attention and support. On its website, the group calls for the repeal of provisions in Bill C-45, which became law in 2013, "(including changes to the Indian Act and Navigable Waters Act, which infringe on environmental protections, Aboriginal and Treaty rights) and abandon all pending legislation which does the same." In cooperation with Defenders of the Land, this growing Indigenous network also calls on Canada to increase proportional representation with regard to "all legislation concerning collective rights and environmental protections"; to live up to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and to "respect the right of Indigenous peoples to say no to development on their territory"; and to "officially repudiate the racist Doctrine of Discovery and the Doctrine of Terra Nullius and abandon their use to justify the seizure of Indigenous Nations' lands and wealth" (Idle No More 2013). The "vision" of Idle No More seems simple: "Idle No More calls on all people to join in a peaceful revolution, to honour Indigenous sovereignty, and to protect the land and water." However, peaceful revolution is a complicated goal that requires an understanding of why these women were motivated to act in November 2012.Indigenous women lead their communities with visionary leadership skills; deep cultural knowledge; and a central focus on spiritual faith, honesty, and integrity. As they have since before the European invasion, Indigenous women are responsible for the health of their communities and have always taken this role seriously. Under continued assault from external and male-dominated political forces, such as the Indian Act, Indigenous women need to possess and exercise forms of political empowerment to maintain and improve the day-to-day lives of their people. Idle No More presents an Indigenous vision of politics that surpasses the control that state sovereignty has over contemporary Aboriginal life. The women leading Idle No More are twenty-first-century debt collectors who have created an attention-grabbing model for decolonial Indigenous feminism that builds upon a rich history of Indigenous resistance to colonial control over land, culture, and lives: a movement that empowers Indigenous women on the path to achieving social justice for Indigenous nations. As other contemporary movements respond and react to injustice and the trampling of rights through street protests and occupation of public spaces, the Idle No More movement is trying to shift the contemporary discourses of rights, sovereignty, and nationhood by arguing that it is Indigenous women who ought to ultimately hold the political power of Indigenous nations, or at the very least have an equal seat at the debate table. According to Leanne Simpson in Dancing on Our Turtle's Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence, "Western-based social movement theory has failed to recognize the broader contextualizations of resistance within Indigenous thought, while also ignoring the contestation of colonialism as a starting point Part of being Indigenous in the 21st century is that regardless of where or how we have grown up, we've all been bathed in a vat of cognitive imperialism, perpetuating the idea that Indigenous Peoples were not, and are not, thinking peoples-an insidious mechanism to promote neo-assimilation and obfuscate the historic atrocities of colonialism" (2011,32). …

"Unspeakable Things Unspoken": Reflections on Teaching Beloved

Abstract: She said, that when the officers and slave-hunters came to the house in which they were concealed, she caught a shovel and struck two of her children on the head, and then took a knife and cut the throat of the third, and tried to kill the other,-that if they had given her time, would have killed them all.P. S. Bassett, "A Visit to the Slave Mother Who Killed Her Child," 18S6A young escaped slave woman kills her baby girl and would have killed her other children if she had not been stopped. When I read the initial reviews of Beloved, Toni Morrisons 1987 novel, my own response was that this is not a story I wanted to read. Indeed it seemed "this was not a story to pass on." For me, after reading Beloved and especially after teaching it, the idea of stories that were not to be "passed on" took on a much more profound meaning about choices and responsibilities, the consequences of forgetting, and the need to come to terms with the past in the present so that such stories are not endlessly repeated. Also, we should not forget how controversial this novel was when it first appeared. Stanley Crouch denounced the novel as a melodramatic blackface holocaust story; it was not deemed worthy of the National Book Award, which led to forty-eight black writers and scholars signing a letter of protest in response to this lack of recognition. Although it went on to win the Pulitzer, Beloved remains on the banned books list in a number of U.S. school districts, presumably because of its depiction of brutality and sexual violence. Yet how else can such a story be told? After years of teaching this novel, it is ever more apparent to me not only what a literary achievement it is but also how important it has been for our rethinking of the history and legacy of slavery. It dares to tell what many of us don't want to remember or know. Like Sethe, we are a people and a nation that still hasn't come to terms with the historical debt of slavery.Beloved is a text that goes beyond statistics and ledger accounts and effectively imagines the profound psychological cost of slavery to the men, women, and children for whom no one was held accountable and for whom no debt is recognized. It not only belies the seemingly ever resurgent myth of slavery as a benign institution (Sweet Home) but also interrogates the deepest existential meaning of freedom (Denard 2008, 44-45). Teaching this novel in a class made up of a diverse group of students, of whom many are immigrants or children of immigrants, can create an underlying tension about issues of identity: belonging and not belonging, anger that is righteous or not so righteous. The subject matter of Beloved is emotionally charged, deliberately so. Some readers see themselves as outsiders; others lay claim to the text as part of their own personal history; many feel defensive about what they perceive as suggestions of racial complicity. For me as a native-born African American who spent her earliest years in the Jim Crow South, the classroom dynamics can be difficult to negotiate. Like Morrison's earlier novels, Beloved has personal resonance for me. It evokes a past that neither I nor my parents' generation experienced but that seemed to live on in the people and places we knew and had been told about. My great-grandmother was the daughter of parents born in slavery. She kept her Bible close but never went to church. As a child I wondered why, but never asked. What conflict did she feel about the power of salvation for descendants of slaves? Like Stamp Paid in Beloved, my great-grandfather changed his name, but in his case the new name was associated with a notorious outlaw, in an act of defiance by my great-grandfather against laws that were never intended to protect him or his family.How then should I assume my own relationship to the text in the classroom? I cannot and would not want to pretend to have a false critical objectivity about the emotionally charged content of the novel, but I would want to leave space for each of the readers in the class to engage with the text, reflecting Morrison's own approach as a writer. …

Trading Credit for Debt: Queer History-Making and Debt Culture

Abstract: Once you start to see bad debt, you start to see it everywhere, hear it everywhere, feel it everywhere.-Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black StudyIf you had gone to the opening of Rare & Raw: Queer History Then and Now at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian History in New York City on February 15, 2013, you would have seen among the small selection of artworks "exploring the themes of queer history, visibility and notions of representation" ("Rare & Raw" 2013) twenty-seven framed photographs from Zoe Leonard's The Fae Richards Photo Archive, originally created for and coanimated by Cheryl Dunye's 1996 film, The Watermelon Woman (Fig. l). Returning to the museum a few days later, you would have found the photos removed from the exhibit and in their place what looked like a foreclosure notice, or what we came to think of as the foreclosure installation: four documents taped to the wall, a record of the loan agreement between the museum and the Eileen Harris Norton Collection, which owns one of the three copies of The Fae Richards Photo Archive and which, on the day of the show's opening, "amended" the loan agreement such that there would be no loan at all (Fig. 2). With "regrets for the unfortunate timing and difficult circumstances," the loan was deemed too high risk and revoked, it seems, because of concerns about the material fragility and value of the photographs (Shim-Boyle, 2013).1The story of this amended installation is compelling to us for a few rea- sons. Most immediately, as dykes of a certain age, we have an affective, aesthetic, and intellectual attachment to The Fae Richards Photo Archive and to The Watermelon Woman; in fact, both of us became committed to the kinds of recuperative and critical feminist and queer storytelling that Leonard, Dunye, and their many collaborators in the project were for(a)ging in the early 1990s. Furthermore, this transaction situates the Leslie-Lohman Museum and the Rare & Raw exhibit (and its project of queer history-making) as unreliable borrowers; that is, the foreclosure installation advertises bad credit and both the museum and the exhibit get thrown into the subject position reserved in U.S. history for African Americans and other minoritized groups figured as socioeconomically delinquent. Moreover, the capital (not) exchanged in this transactionThe Fae Richards Photo Archive-is a series of images signifying the forgotten or abandoned African American lesbian histories that Dunye and her collaborators work to repossess and revalue in The Watermelon Woman, a repossession that might be said to expose the violence of (cultural) capital itself, a system that has historically devalued the lives and work of African Americans and queers. And finally, this story is compelling for us because in the moment of encountering that familiar scene-cheap paper printed with legal text, contradictorily taped both haphazardly and with forceful, binding purpose across a prominent wall (usually the front door of a repossessed property)-we were reminded of the ways in which so much queer history-making negotiates the strained relationship between good credit and bad debt. That is, the eloquent shock of this foreclosure installation activated our thinking about queer history-making through debt as a mode of inquiry, as methodology, as "queer hermeneutics" and "black study" (Crosby et al. 2012, 130) that "runs in every direction, scatters, escapes" (Harney and Moten 2013,61).Here, we propose that the repossession of The Fae Richards Photo Archive effectively resituates The Watermelon Woman and Rare & Raw into the context of debt culture. As Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva remind us, this is a culture "embedded in the colonial and racial matrix of capitalist accumulation of land (conquest and settlement), exploitation of labor (slavery, indentured labor, forced migration), appropriation of resources, and ultimately the very meaning of debt in what Walter Mignolo calls the modern/colonial world system'" (Chakravartty and da Silva 2012, 364). …

The Debt of Memory: Reparations, Imagination, and History in Toni Morrison's Beloved

Abstract: This essay focuses on Toni Morrison's groundbreaking novel Beloved and examines the issue of reparations in economic, affective, and historical terms. Beloved, I claim, addresses these debts via fiction by delving into the recesses of traumatic memory. Debt is the overriding metaphor of our time, a quintessential^ modernizing state and activity that weaves inequalities into the fabric and practice of capital. To incur debt is to enter into an interpolative arrangement in which capital confers recognition through repetitive consumption. Morrison's novel redirects our contemporary dependence on and understanding of debt from a tangible economic figure or amount to a cumulative colonial deficit spanning the space and time of slavery. In this sense, contemporary economic debt functions as a recurring sign in the longue duree of racial history, which calls for layered forms of reparations. When Morrison states, at the end of the novel, "This is not a story to pass on" ( 1987,274), she asks the reader to confront the debt assumed by the traumas of slavery to enable us to transform this inheritance into a beloved future. To pass this story down is to forge a new repository of memory upon which a severely incurred debt-mnemonic, social, and material-can begin to be defrayed. Therefore fiction, for Morrison, compels the reader to reimagine a concealed past as a reparative starting point, which not only summons the ghastly foundations of the Americas but in so doing, initiates conversations surrounding what was lost, established, and still owed.Indeed, the idea of reparations has seen various iterations since the end of slavery. Not only did President Lincoln favor some sort of reparations for newly freed slaves but several decades later, in 1915, Cornelius J. Jones brought a lawsuit demanding sixty-eight million dollars in reparative compensation for unpaid slave labor. In 1944 Gunnar Myrdal, Swedish economist and Nobel laureate, in his book An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, argued for parcels of former plantations to be made available to ex-slaves through manageable, longterm installment plans. The call for reparations continued in the 1960s, when black activist James Forman, in his controversial Black Manifesto, boldly proposed five hundred million dollars in damages. Moreover, in 1972, in The Case for Black Reparations, Yale Law School professor Boris Bittker asserted that a history of race-based discrimination from slavery to Jim Crow, spanning over three centuries, caused undue social and economic injury to African Americans and suggested the creation of a program to distribute resources to America's black descendants of slaves. Finally, in a more recent text, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, Randall Robinson makes the case for a national economic response that would effectively close "the yawning gap between blacks and whites" (Robinson 2000, 204).1 However, Robinson's argument marks a shift from a reductive, if necessary and just, economic discussion to a more wide-ranging cultural, historic, and psychic understanding of debt.2As he argues: "But only slavery, with its sadistic patience, asphyxiated memory, and smothered cultures, has hulled empty a whole race of people with inter-generational efficiency. Every artifact of the victims' past cultures, every custom, every ritual, every god, every language, every trace element of a people's whole heredity identity, wrenched from them and ground into a sharpe choking dust. It is a human rights crime without parallel in the modern world. For it produces its victims ad infinitum, long after the active statge of the crime has ended" (Robinson 2000, 216). In the absence of economic reparations, Robinson proposes a "black renaissance" (237-47), a dynamic return to knowledge, memory, and creativity as a formula to halt the production of victims generated by the aftereffects of slavery and colonialism. Thus, Robinson compels the reader to confront the varying dimensions of debt as, on the one hand, the virulent conjunction of economic processes-centuries of forced and unpaid labor-and on the other, the imposed erasure of memory and culture. …

Douloti the Bountiful

Abstract: WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 42: 1 & 2 (Spring/Summer 2014) © 2014 by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. All rights reserved. —Where have you come from, Somni? —They brought me from Barha village. —Did they say they would marry you? —Why should they? I was already married. —Already married? —Yes yes. And I have my man at home. —How did you come? —Was there another way? My man took two hundred rupees from him, to get land. Hoo, in a year it became four thousand rupees. Then the god said to my man, You won’t be able to repay, you are a kamiya. Send your wife. Your debt will be repaid in five years, your wife will return home with money in hand. I kept my son with my husband and came here. —And the boy? —He is in Barha. The god has lots of land in Barha. —How many children do you have here? —Three. Somni put her hand to her cheek and said, “See what a strange thing. I was married in childhood, and I stayed with my man for so long. I had only one son. And Latia made me the mother of three sons in a row. —Those sons? —They lie around in the marketplace. They beg. They don’t let you live with your child, and clients come up to one month before birth. Then I can’t for three months. —Then? —The god lends money. Douloti the Bountiful

Introduction: Life and Debt

Abstract: Give back the life I gaveyou pay me my money downso there's no questionI did it for love for anythingbut desireput a tarnished nickel in my dishso the guard will knowwhen he comeswith a bleeding chickentied to his wristwith a bitter promisethat we are not kinuncomm i tied for ever.-Audre Lorde, "Generation III"What, precisely, does it mean to say that our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of a business deal? What does it mean when we reduce moral obligations to debts? What changes when the one turns into the other? And how do we speak about them when our language has been so shaped by the market? -A debt is the obligation to pay a certain sum of money. As a result, a debt, unlike any other form of obligation, can be precisely quantifiedOne does not need to calculate the human effects; one need only calculate principal, balances, penalties, and rates of interest....-Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 YearsAs editors, we share a personal debt-and a professional lifetime of giving and receiving-to the City University of New York, Hunter College, and the PhD programs in Political Science (Ros) and English (Meena) at the CUNY Graduate Center. These have been the academic homes whose students and colleagues have nurtured our thinking for so many years but also the incubator of some troubling thoughts about the meaning, in everyday life terms, of debt. The question of a whole generation of young people bound by student debt is something that we see close at hand. It forms part of a whole chain of injustices that affect them not only as students but also as recent immigrants (or children of immigrants), working-class people, and victims of racism and gender inequality-imminent castaways in a precarious job market, in addition perhaps to their being foot soldiers in the armies of the medically uninsured and credit-deficient.So our decision to devote an issue of WSQto the theme of "Debt" was initially driven by the outrage we shared with the Occupy Movement, the Occupy Student Debt Campaign, and their many allies across the globe at the ways in which higher education-our work world-has become "a profit engine for financiers, asset speculators, and real estate developers" (Occupy Student Debt Campaign 2013). As our CUNY colleague, sociologist Jack Hammond, has written concerning "the student debt bubble," 'At more than one trillion dollars, student loans have grown to exceed total credit card debt. Debt has become a standard part of the college experience. Students take it on because they expect it to pay off in better jobs and higher salaries. But many will be disappointed" (Hammond 2012). Monica Johnsons marvelous graphic novel, The Adventures of Dorrit Little, one chapter of which is printed in this issue, illustrates the dire experience and limited choices of a typical student slaving away at a low-paying, food service job while contemplating the lifetime of debt that grad school is likely to entail. Moreover, as Dorrit s wan expressions only hint at, new findings by medical researchers at Northwestern University show that the stresses of having to pay off massive loans are hitting young people with health as well as financial costs-in the form of higher blood pressure, hypertension, and depression (Von Hoffman 2013). Is student debt becoming an apparatus for training and disciplining bodies, an apprenticeship in debt enfranchisement? Has debt become the newly normal way of performing citizenship?Debt is thus not only a bleak reality that corrodes our institutions, families, and communities; it also raises larger political, philosophical, and historical questions that resonate globally. In contemplating an issue of WSQ. that would capture this landscape, we asked, what does it mean to live in a world of debt-whether you are a college student in the United States, a struggling farmer in India, a homeowner, or a country? …

Demonstrating Peace Countertopographically: Women in Black's Solidarity at a Distance

Abstract: Just before 5:30 p.m. on a sunny Wednesday afternoon, five women gathered outside the central Manhattan Public Library where Forty-First Street meets Fifth Avenue. All wore black, some head to toe, some with bare shoulders and arms. They formed a silent line facing rush hour pedestrian and automobile traffic holding a large black banner reading, "Women in Black Against War." At one edge of the small group a woman handed fliers to passersby. The first lines of the handout asserted, "Women in Black New York stand in silent vigil to protest war, rape as a tool of war, ethnic cleansing and human rights abuses all over the world. We are silent because mere words cannot express the tragedy that wars and hatred bring. We refuse to add to the cacophony of empty statements that are spoken with the best intentions yet may be erased or go unheard under the sound of a passing ambulance or a bomb exploding nearby." Over the course of an hour a few more women joined the group. At one point the group numbered eight-all participants over thirty, most over fifty, and all white save for one Black woman appearing to be in her fifties. Most onlookers were also silent. Some took fliers. Others nodded in agreement. Many kept walking, some giving the silent women a quick glimpse. One younger woman en route to somewhere else spontaneously stopped and stood for a few minutes. Passengers on commuter buses observed the vigil from the comfort of air-conditioned seats. A few people verbally asserted their support. Still fewer made disparaging comments.This small group transformed a tiny section of concrete in Manhattan's vast urban landscape into a site for quiet contemplation in the midst of late afternoon busyness. Their attire marked them as separate from locals in business suits and fashionable black, and tourists in summer tank tops and shorts. Together, their silence, immobility, and monotonie black outfits, along with the seriousness of their demeanor, lent a ritualistic tone to their presence. Despite the surrounding bustle, they stood, rupturing the ordinary chaos around them and demonstrating solidarity with people far away. From a wealthy city in a prosperous and militarily aggressive nation, they silently used their gazes and bodies to evoke faraway events and refuse complicity with war-making. By reworking the silence expected of them as women in a male-dominated society, they sought to transform socially prescribed passivity into an active refusal to support or engage in violence.I approach this Women in Black (hereafter WiB) vigil, and another I discuss below, from a feminist perspective that emphasizes the transgressive potential of public disidentification, in Jose Esteban Munoz's sense of the term, with patriarchal expectations of women. For Munoz, disidentification inhabits something differently, in ways that maximize the potential for reworking toxic ideals, such as those that see politics as masculine and women as passive supporters of war-making (Munoz 1999). WiB s strategic deployment of silence demonstrates their astute analysis of gendered spatial conventions and their awareness of the limits of loud, often angry chanting to demonstrate a political position. Given the gravity of the situations they vigil to remember and contest, these public enactments are necessarily limited; nonetheless their limitations do not obliterate thenpossibility for intervention. On the contrary, their public performance of their solidaristic feelings demonstrates the shared humanity of participants and those suffering and dying during war and occupation.Using theoretical approaches to solidarity from Sandra Lee Bartky, Jodi Dean, Carol Gould, and Chandra Mohanty, this essay explores how WiB groups in the United States and United Kingdom express, in Barkty s terms, their "feeling-with" others, especially other women, experiencing war and occupation. In exploring one type of feeling-with, Bartky explains that "emotional infection as a builder of solidarity is promiscuous; its utility rests precisely in its capacity to unite feeling persons from a very wide spectrum of social locations" (2002,76). …

Who is HIV For

Abstract: In 1983, at the Second National AIDS Forum, activists from the burgeoning People With AIDS Self-Empowerment movement created a manifesto. The Denver Principles asserted a radical subjectivity: "We condemn attempts to label us as 'victims,' a term that implies defeat, and we are only occasionally 'patients,' a term that implies passivity, helplessness, and dependence upon the care of others. We are 'People With AIDS.'"Around this same time, drawing upon a legacy of black women's uniquely intersectional position, Alice Walker coined the term "womanist": "A woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women's culture, women's emotional flexibility... Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female" (Walker 1984).The Denver Principles and womanism illustrate that within the community of marginalized others there should be opportunities to name oneself, and from there-the thinking goes-it should be "Nothing About Us Without Us," a phrase made popular by disability activists. Yet assertions of subjectivity around HIV/AIDS have become more complicated, blurring the line between, as Paula Treichler writes, "what is self? what is not-self?" (Treichler 1999), with language being a site for clarity and confusion.I am a white, HIV-negative man who organizes public events around HIV for both work and community. Almost always, more negative people than people living with HIV attend. Recently I organized a bonfire where more than twenty people came to talk about HIV, with only one of us openly living with the virus. When I told a friend who is living with the virus about this, he was shocked. "What did you talk about?" he asked. 'AIDS," I said. True, AIDS was the subject, but what was the subtext?The bonfire is not an isolated incident, rather, it points to a larger phenomenon. People with HIV are becoming further sidelined as social justice marketing campaigns and pharmaceutical interventions attempt to and successfully negate material differences between being HIV positive and HIV negative. Last year Project Runway contestant Jack Mackenroth partnered with World Health Clinicians to create HIV Equal, which has as its tag line, "Everybody has an HIV status. We are all HIV Equal." Nice idea, but are we all equal?Similarly, the Stigma Project launched "Live HIV Neutral," a campaign meant to be:...a state of mind, regardless of your status, in which you are informed and aware of the constantly evolving state of HIV/AIDS. Living a "neutral" lifestyle is being a visible advocate in the fight to end HIV and the stigma that strengthens it.Strange use of a word that means "not helping or supporting either side in a conflict, disagreement." Who can afford to adopt this status? In the face of an ongoing crisis, is neutrality something to champion?Last year, when the Stigma Project partnered with the National Black Gay Men's Advocacy Coalition, and the National Minority AIDS Council to create the "Come Out Against Stigma" campaign, my friend Mathew made the "I am LGBTQ_and HIV Neutral" poster his Facebook profile picture. I was shocked, because as a writer and HIV activist, he is anything but neutral. In talking about it, he discussed how he refrained from selecting the available "HIV Negative" posters because he didn't want to sound "too proud, divisive." Frustrated by the limits of "living neutral," he explained he is interested in focusing on what can unite rather than divide, exhausted by the idea promoted in activism-and academia-that difference is the only way to "make meaning." Mathew, not living with the virus, was trying-within the movement-to figure out who he is in relation to HIV.In the summer of 2013 I interviewed photographer Rosalind Solomon for Visual AIDS, where I worked as the programs manager for three years. In 1988, her Portraits in the Time of AIDS debuted at the Grey Art Gallery in New York City, one of the first exhibitions with people living with AIDS as subject. …

Lean Back: Lessons from Woolf

Abstract: A while back, a colleague and I were rehashing the anticipatory buzz and backlash inspired by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg's then forthcoming Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. My colleague, knowing that I work on Virginia Woolf 's writing, speculated, "It's kind of like A Room of One's Own, right?" In part to be polite but mostly to conceal my embarrass- ment at having no clue what she meant, I more or less agreed: "Yeah, that's really interesting." What exactly she had in mind, I am still not sure. But the notion that Woolf 's manifesto for women's creative freedom could have anything in common with what I imagined to be Sandberg's postfeminist information age success manual stuck with me, so much so that I preordered Lean In despite my anxiety about supporting a cause with which I was pretty cer - tain I would not be on board. Having now read it, I cannot help but think that my co-worker was onto something. Sandberg's feminism is kind of like Woolf 's feminism—at least to a point. As I probably should have realized off the bat, both Woolf 's and Sand - berg's feminisms are constrained by class in complex and sometimes problematic ways, and for this and related reasons each writer has been charged with elitism. Queenie Leavis's scathing review of Woolf 's other feminist classic, Three Guineas , is exemplary in this regard. Woolf, Leavis observed, "is quite insulated by class" and, by her own account, "has per- sonally received considerably more in the way of economic ease than she is humanly entitled to" (1938, 203-4). Sandberg similarly acknowledges her own economic ease, admitting that it somewhat limits her scope: "Parts of this book will be most relevant to women fortunate enough to have choices

Debt, the Precarious Grammar of Life, and Manjula Padmanabhan's Harvest

Abstract: Life an debt freedom not yet-Mutabaruka, "Life and Debt"What is a debt, anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence.-David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 YearsIn the first epigraph above, Jamaican artist Mutabaruka's pithy lyric captures freedom's antinomies by questioning freedom's content and temporality. To live a life excruciatingly tethered to debt is to live a conjunctional "life an' debt." 1 In Mutabaruka's formulation, life and debt are one and the same; debt owns your life, and in doing so, it owns your freedom. By taking residence as the content of formal freedom, debt works in this instance to vacate or evict the substantive meaning of freedom and to forestall the event and temporality of freedom as a "not yet." In this sense, we can speak of debt as a "shifting grammar of life" (Rajan 2006, 14) that perpetually recedes before our horizon into a future tense, a vanishing point through which a "not yet" freedom is perhaps glimpsed but always foreclosed. Haunting this vanishing point is the term that Mutabaruka selfconsciously substitutes debt for: death. A life of debt forecloses an intimacy with freedom, which is to say that it forces an intimacy with forms of social and physical death. Debt, in other words, can be a death sentence, and while some might be able to have their sentences commuted and still live a social death, others experience a literal physical death flashing blindingly forward, a fatal present tense. If, as David Graeber suggests, a debt is "just the perversion of a promise," a promise "corrupted by both math and violence," then who can have their debt/death sentences commuted, who can have their debts forgiven altogether, and who must fully repay thendebts with interest (Graeber 2011, 391)? Within this economy, who must keep their promises? Mutabaruka, and his Jamaican nation, must do so; they must pay their promissory notes. The reason lies in the "math and violence" to which they have been subjected, a history of colonialism and racial chattel slavery succeeded by more recent forms of neocolonial domination and an international uneven division and proliferation not only of gendered racial labor but also of debt.This continued corruption of the promise by math and violence perpetually keeps Mutabaruka's longing for freedom, the promise of freedom, in the future tense. His future tense grammar, as at once a specific temporality of freedom as well as a broader system of signification, calls to mind other similar grammars, such as that of Hortense Spillers. Tracing the total objectification of the captive body as flesh within the U.S. context of chattel slavery, she calls, and theorizes the symbolic order instantiated by the African slave trade as, an "American grammar." One of the distinctive features of this grammar is that it "remains grounded in the originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation so that it is as if neither time nor history, nor historiography and its topics, show movement, as the human subject is murdered' over and over again" (Spillers 2003, 208). This, as Saidiya Hartman writes, is the afterlife of slavery, an afterlife not only symbolic but also crushingly material (Hartman 2008). That is, formal emancipation for the enslaved in the United States represented not a radical rupture but rather a "nonevent." The whip of chattel slavery was replaced with the "burdened individuality of freedom," constituted by the tethers of liberalism: a guilty conscience, notions of responsibility modeled on contractual obligation, calculated reciprocity, and most importantly, indebtedness, since "debt played a central role in the creation of the servile, blameworthy, and guilty individual and in the reproduction and transformation of involuntary servitude" (Hartman 1997, 9). The longue duree of the "nonevent" of emancipation from a range of distinct yet related forms of unfreedom throughout the globe-whether racial chattel slavery, colonial subjugation, racial genocide, debt peonage, contract labor, apartheid, or incarceration-has produced and continues to produce increased levels of privation and debt, as well as greater vulnerability to being rendered surplus populations of essentially disposable lives. …

Suffering at the Margins: (Re)Centering Black Women in Discourses on Violence and Crime

Abstract: Angela Y. Davis's The Meaning of Freedom and Other Difficult Dialogues, San Francisco: City Lights, 2012Beth Ritchie's Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America's Prison Nation, New York: New York University Press, 2012Jill A. McCorkel's Breaking Women: Gender, Race, and the New Politics of Imprisonment, New York: New York University Press, 2013The explosion in the American prison-industrial complex, and the fate of prisoners trapped within it, has generated a substantial rise in public and scholarly interest in more recent years. Activists, scholars, teachers, community leaders, and students alike continue to forge dialogues on the current realities and the possible endless future of mass incarceration. Amid these conversations the fate of black boys and black men fueled into the carceral pipeline remains the primary focal point. Yet recent trends in popular culture-specifically Orange Is the New Black-have begun to signal new directions, effectively overturning the privileging of male narratives by offering a visual entry into the world of women and prisons. In much the same way, academics are similarly engaging the gendered and social landscapes of the carceral system, evidenced through the recent works of Angela Davis, Beth Ritchie, and Jill McCorkel, who lend intellectual strength to this important and national introspection on prisons. They each lay bare contemporary narratives of structural racism anchored amid the U.S. rise of the prison-industrial complex, which-far from rehabilitative-is hinged upon the cyclical mass movement of people of color and the poor into institutional captivity.Digital media by way of the Netflix original series Orange Is the New Black provides the first real exposure through an online platform for both national and international audiences to consider the often-marginalized lives of women jailed for various crimes. Described by the network's CEOs as "our most watched original series ever," Orange relies on a widely pop- ular 2010 memoir to dramatize the story of a young, middle-class white woman forced to serve fifteen months for a crime she had committed years before. Through thirteen episodes and countless comedic moments, viewers follow how the pampered yet witty main character, Piper Chapman, navigates and thus survives regimented prison life alongside women from differing lines of race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and mental well-being. On the one hand, Orange overturns the exclusion of women in discourses on criminality and prisons. But, on the other hand, closer engagement with the racialized narratives of other characters' arrest, their experiences in the legal arena, and the cumulative effects of imprisonment are creatively sidelined through Piper's story. Therein, personal favors, romantic and sexual flings, and unending threats of revenge acted out through different episodes superficially expose constructed codes and commonly agreed rules among all the inmates and officers. However, Orange invariably presents a particular idea of prison life centered on white femininity that not only reinscribes stereotypes of criminal behavior among people of color but also, in an effort to make incarceration more palatable for a wider viewing audience, makes the physical and psychological toll of prison life appear far less harsh than it is.In stark contrast to the rather semicomedic tone Orange takes toward prison life, Angela Davis in The Meaning of Freedom and Other Difficult Dialogues provides a compilation of hard-hitting philosophical speeches centering the very real convergence of political, economical, and social forces that, in her estimation, fuels an ever-expanding system of prisons aimed at constraining the lives of diverse individuals. Davis's speeches, spanning from 1994 to 2009, reveal the evolution of her passionate ideological perceptions related to the drastic economic boom achieved through the rise of and governmental reliance on the construction of prisons, including "supermaxes," in the global prison-industrial complex. …