Independence

“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.”

-Frederick Douglass, 1852  - Independence Day Speech at Rochester, New York

via (notes on) politics, theory, and photography

Colonial-Style

“Under the colonial regime, anything may be done for a loaf of bread or a miserable sheep.  The relations of man with matter, withing the world outside and with history are in the colonial period simply relations with food.  For a colonized man, in a contest of oppresion like that of Algeria, living does not mean embodying moral values or taking his place in the coherent and fruitful development of the world.  To live means to keep on existing.  Every date is a victory: not the result of work, but a victory felt as a triumph of life.”

-Frantz Fanon, 1963 (The Wretched of the Earth.  Middelsex, UK: Penguin.  Pg. 249)

Public terror, private terror

“The key point is that [Richard] Wright connected the violence found in the private, domestic sphere to the ritual public brutality that was a means of political administration in the South. This public terror did more than help create conditions in which private violence could thrive. It was shadowed by the domestic authoritarianism and violence which it also required if the racially coercive social order was to function smoothly. Both varieties of brutality were shaped by the active residues of slave society in which lines between public and private became hard to draw.”

-Paul Gilroy, 1993 (The Black Atlantic. Boston: Harvard University Press. Pg 175)

Factory enthusiasts

“It is very characteristic that the enthusiastic apologists of the factory system have nothing more damning to urge against a general organization of the labor of society, than that it would turn all society into one immense factory.”

-Karl Marx, 1867 (Capital, volume 1. New York: The Modern Library. Pg 391)

The Trinity: Order-Savage-Utopia

“In defense of a particular vision of order, the Savage became evidence for a particular type of utopia.  That the same ethnographic source could be used to make the opposite point did not matter beyond a minimal requirement for verisimilitude…But now, as before, the Savage is only evidence within a debate, the importance of which surpasses not only his understanding but his very existence.

Just as utopia itself can be offered as a promise or as a dangerous illusion, the Savage can be noble, wise, barbaric, victim, or aggressor, depending on the debate and the aims of the interlocutors.  The space within the slot is not static, and its changing contents are not pre-determined by its structural position…a critique of anthropology cannot skirt around this slot.  The direction of the discipline now depends upon an explicit attack on that slot itself and the symbolic order upon which it is premised.  As long as the slot remains, the Savage is at best a figure of speech, a metaphor in an argument about nature and the universe, about being and existence – in short, an argument about foundational thought”

-Michel-Rolph Trouillot, 2003 (Global Transformations.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan Pg. 22-3.)

Surprise!

“If it is really true…that what makes us human is above all our capacity to make history, and if history consists of actions that could not have been predicted beforehand, then that would mean that the fundamental measure of our humanity lies in what we cannot know about each other. To recognize another person as human would then be to recognize the limits of one’s possible knowledge of them. Their humanity is inseparable from their capacity to surprise us”

-David Graeber, 2007 (Lost People.  Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.  Pg 388)

These Old Wars

“[W]e are not faced with a peace unfairly shattered, nor with a “war of civilizations,” …a war of the worlds has been raging all along, throughout the so-called “modern age”—this modern parenthesis. Still, nothing proves we are on the wrong side, and nothing proves either that this war cannot be won. What is sure is that it has to be waged explicitly and not covertly. The worst course would be to act as if there were no war at all, only the peaceful extension of Western natural Reason using its police forces to combat, contain, and convert the many Empires of Evil. That is the mistake those who still believe they are moderns are in danger of making. On the other hand, if we are going to bring the wars of modernization to an end, we cannot afford to declare that all bets are off, that premodern savagery will be met with premodern savagery, that senseless violence will answer senseless violence. No, what is needed is a new recognition of the old war we have been fighting all along—in order to bring about new kinds of negotiation, and a new kind of peace.”

-Bruno Latour, 2002 (War of the Worlds: what about peace? Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.  Pg 3-4)