Spaces of Co-liberation

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935), 3.

“concilium coetusque hominum jure sociati.” William Smith, “Civitas (Roman),” A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiguities (London: John Murray, 1875), 291-293.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977 (1807)), and Du Bois, Black Reconstruction.

Alexander Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (New York: Basic Books, 1969).

Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, 1 (2012), 1–40.

Du Bois, Black Reconstruction.

There is a large body of research and debate on this matter, which I don’t have the space to fully reconstruct here. It is useful here to keep in mind Ruthie Wilson Gilmore’s definition of racism as: “… the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” Ruthie Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 28. Cedric Robinson specifically ties the development of capitalism to racism in his term “racial capitalism”: “The development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology.” Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed Press, 1983), 2.

A careful writer, Du Bois never outspokenly makes this connection, but it there for the reader to find it.

Suburbanization also produced oil economies abroad that remain dependent on the fluctuations in the price of oil, just one example of the many transnational repercussions of these policies.

We find many of these histories in specialized forums, for instance in journals dedicated to vernacular architecture or cultural studies. In reaction to the events in Charlottesville, VA of August 2017, I initiated a crowdsourced reading list on how race and racism are constructed with spatial means, and on how in turn space can be shaped by racism. This reading list, collectively produced by over forty architectural historians, is meant primarily as a teaching resource. It’s open to the public and available here: ➝. I have also been involved in reformulating the histories we teach through the Feminist Art and Architecture Collaborative (FAAC). See FAAC, “Counterplanning from the Classroom,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 76:3 (September 2017), 277–279.

Ananya Roy, “The City in the Age of Trumpism,” talk at Taubman College (November 17, 2017), ➝. See also Ananya Roy, “The Infrastructure of Assent: Professions in the Age of Trumpism,” The Avery Review 21 (January 2017), ➝.

Iris Marion Young, “Impartiality and the Civic Public.” In Feminism as critique: essays on the politics of gender in late-capitalist societies, eds. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (Cambridge: Polity, 1987). Hannah Arendt precedes this critique when she finds attempts to overcome plurality result in the arbitrary domination of others, or an imaginary world where these others do not exist. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 234.

Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text 25/26 (1990): 56–80. James Holston, “Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship.” In Cities and Citizenship, eds. James Holston and Arjun Appadurai (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 37–56.

Here I am deliberately eliding more idealized definitions of the public sphere by Jürgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt in favor of a position towards the inclusion of difference, following Claude Mouffe, Oskar Negt, and Alexander Kluge, among others. For discussion on some of these positions vis-à-vis public space see Rosalyn Deutsche, “Agoraphobia.” In Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996). See also Reinhold Martin, “Public and Common(s),” Places Observer (January 2013), ➝.

I refer here to Peter Eisenman’s insistence on the reading of architecture as an instrument of resistance to power, most recently in Peter Eisenman, Kurt W. Forster, Jacques Herzog, and Philip Ursprung, “The End of Theory? A Conversation” e-flux architecture (November 10, 2017), ➝.

Indigenous Media Group, “Accomplices not Allies: Abolishing the Ally Industrial Complex,” Indigenous Action (May 4, 2014), ➝.

A notion that stems from collaboration with the Axis powers during World War II.

Tawana “Honeycomb” Petty, “Shifting the Language: From Ally to co-Liberator,” Eclectablog (December 17, 2017), ➝.

See Abolitionist Planning for Resistance, ➝; We The People of Detroit Community Research Collective, ➝.

“Black Lives Matter issues a statement on Trump’s election,” mic.com (November 15, 2016), ➝.