M-L-M Mayhem!

This is the third part in my series of reflections on Jasbir K. Puar's Terrorist Assemblages .  The first part can be found here and the second here . The first chapter of Terrorist Assemblages is entitled "the sexuality of terrorism" and this immediately fills me with slight misgiving.  While I agree that, especially in light of this book's subject matter, it makes sense to examine "discourses of sexuality (and their attendant anxieties)––heterosexuality, homosexuality, queerness, metrosexuality, alternative and insurgent sexuality," I am not at all convinced that without these discourses, as Puar claims, "the twin mechanisms of normalization and banishment that distinguish the terrorist from the patriot would cease to properly behave." (37) To my mind an imperialist project accumulates particular and secondary ideologies and discursive frameworks that are always contingent upon its social-historical context––that is, contingent upon the way im...

The following is part of a "Let's Read" series where I plan to blog, slowly and probably interspersed with other posts, about my reflections of Jasbir K. Puar's Terrorist Assemblages . This first of these posts, concerning the Preface and an explanation as to what this series is, can be found here .  Today I'm reflecting on the Introduction. Yes, every post in this series will most likely contain a variant of the book's cover. The fact that the Introduction is titled "homonationalism and biopolitics", combined with what Puar has already claimed about "biopolitics" in the Preface, is somewhat worrisome for a historical materialist who finds the entire category of "biopolitics" suspect.  Let's be clear: there is indeed something about the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics that is politically useful––it's even useful in the way that Agamben mobilizes it––but at the end of the day this strikes me as an avoidance of a ...

This is going to be the first in a series (though not sequential, and will probably happen slowly between other posts) of posts where I reflect on Jasbir K. Puar's Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times   as I read it.  Less of a review and more of an impressionistic reading, this series is inspired by the "Let's Read" series' on the ronanwills blog where the author would read popular fantasy/sci-fi books and reflect, often quite hilariously, on each chapter.  When I first read some of these posts I thought to myself, "I should do something similar with a work of popular theory."  I was pretty sure, however, that it would not be as funny… In any case, I finally decided to try this format out with Terrorist Assemblages .  Over five years ago I picked up Puar's book because I knew it would be important; I guessed some of its concepts and subject matter would eventually become standard within radical theory circles, and though I was co...

In a recent post I mentioned my encounter with a nihilist turn in radical theory.  Since making that post––which was mainly a complaint based on my first impression after having read these "nihilist" texts––I have reread and crafted a sustained polemic about the problems inherent in this understanding of reality.  Furthermore, as noted in the aforelinked post, there was something in these nihilist approaches that intersected with other minorly popular theories, such as left accelerationism, and ended up conceptualizing them altogether as an ab-movementism . I won't let the proverbial cat out of the bag regarding: i) why I bothered to write what turned out to be 60+ pages on what is in fact be a completely minor trend (or trends); ii) why I link both the two instances of nihilism ("nihilist communism" and "queer nihilism") with accelerationism, treating all three as a larger untheorized trend; iii) what I mean by ab-movementism, why I think this ...

[I originally planned to post this on July 4th but then, partially because I didn't have the time or energy to finish it, decided that it would be better to post it on the date of Marat's execution by a reactionary agent.  And no, I do not think that Charlotte Corday was some "hero" for assassinating a revolutionary simply because she was a woman; there were far more women who were on the side of the French Revolution and Corday was a royalist.] Despite the fact that the American and French Revolutions overlapped, and despite the fact that historians have attempted to draw parallels (particularly since Thomas Paine visited France at the height of its revolution), there is a significant theoretical distance between these two events.  The way this distance is charted by historians and popular culture is often quite telling in that it tends to reveal one's political commitments. Just as a European historian's identity as a progressive or a reactionary is reve...

I've decided to restart an old side blog project that was initially intended to be a shared blog with my partner.  The point was to make a joint blog dedicated to engagements with culture (novel reviews, etc.) where we could write some joint articles, maybe have some fun, and where at least I could centralize writing about novels and movies.  We named it Achilles, Powder and Lead  after a quote from Marx's Grundrisse  and, after a few posts, it became dormant. Since I've read a lot of novels and watched a lot of films that I would like to review––and since I think these reviews might be anachronistic here––I've decided to restart that blog and link it to this one.  Indeed, in the time that it has been dormant I have read at least three books that I thought were more worthy of review than what I reviewed before: Roberto Bolaño's 2666 , Sofia Samatar's A Stranger in Olondria , and Paul Kingsnorth's The Wake … the last of which caused me to restart Achilles, ...

EDIT: One of the commenters below has brought up an important intervention.  To be fair, after writing this I was somewhat uncomfortable with the way I let it stand, and I'm glad someone has intervened.  I'd urge anyone who reads this old post to also read this website mentioned in the comment. I'm obviously not the only person who was shocked to discover, in the wake of the Rachel Dolezal revelation, that Andrea Smith was not an Indigenous woman , despite having built an academic reputation on this very fact.  For those who are unaware, Smith published the seminal and very important book Conquest , that chronicled the intersection of sexual violence and genocide in the Americas, and was also one of the founders of INCITE.  Like many, and though I did not always agree with Smith's political positions (i.e. such as her many blanket and ahistorical claims about Marxism-Leninism), I have been influenced by both her academic and political work and was under the impres...