Always Already Podcast » Episodes

We’re back! After a not-so-brief hiatus, we’re excited to bring you a very special and energizing episode. James and Sid talk with Dr. Vincent Lloyd about his latest book, Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination. In this lively conversation, your hosts and Vincent explore the new moral and political vocabulary of contemporary Black racial justice. Breaking down barriers between activist and academic knowledge-production, Black Dignity offers a novel and urgent perspective on anti-Black domination, Black love, Black rage, Black futures, Black struggle, and, most importantly, Black dignity. In this wide-ranging conversation, we ask Vincent how he engages with debates around Afropessimism and Black optimism, the role of religion, theology, and struggle, Black feminist thinking, the Black radical tradition, differences between liberals and leftists, revolution and abolition, and much, much more. The thoughtful exchanges between James, our resident expert on all things religious, theological, and mystical, and Vincent on ontology, apophatics, soteriology, conjuring, and spirituality are not to be missed. Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes or Spotify. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here. Links: Dr. Vincent Lloyd’s Faculty Bio Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination (Yale UP, 2022) Press website Villanova University Center for Political Theology and Political Theology Network Blog 

In this episode, John is joined by his colleague, Dr. Breea Willingham, to discuss her multiple forms of work on higher education in prisons, both within and without academia. Their conversation about the new Journal of Higher Education in Prison, the Jamii Sisterhood, the States of Incarceration Project, and being a Black woman abolitionist in the discipline of Criminal Justice raises several pressing questions: how does one define an academic field that seeks to abolish the need for that very field? How do Black women scholars enact political practices between academic institutions that reject them and carceral systems that would capture them? What is abolitionist pedagogy at a rural PWI in a county and region structured by their carceral warehousing of Black and Brown people? How are Black women made hyper (in)visible by academia and by American society? Listen in as we engage these and related issues. Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes or Spotify. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here. Links: Dr. Breea Willingham on twitter and at the Jamii Sisterhood Volume I, Issue 1 of the Journal of Higher Education in Prison The Jamii Sisterhood on facebook, including the announcement of their Spring 2022 symposium SUNY Plattsburgh’s contribution to States of Incarceration, “Cuffs to Classroom: College in Prison — How Can Higher Education Redefine Mass Incarceration in New York’s North Country“; Mountain Lake PBS coverage of the exhibition Willingham’s TedXArcadia talk, “Blinded By My Black Skin: The Hyper (In)visibility of Black Women“ Photo courtesy of Dr. Breea Willingham

Back from a hiatus in western Massachusetts, B joins John and special guest co-host Alyssa Ruth Mazer to discuss Miguel de Beistegui’s book The Government of Desire: A Genealogy of the Liberal Subject. What is a liberal subject and how does desire open up its discourses and genealogy and governmentalities? Did Beistegui try to out-Foucault…Foucault, the book’s stated intellectual inspiration? The team attempts a reparative reading of the Introduction, Conclusion and Beistegui’s chapters on recognition. But these three self-professed genealogists hit a snag. Critiquing the murky depths of desire and recognition requires more than what the Western canon provides! What happened to queer theory? Is there feminism at all? Could Black and Indigenous theories of personhood have made a more prominent appearance? Is there a “true” kind of resistance? With so much to discuss, you can’t not desire tuning in! Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes or Spotify. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here. Links: De Beistegui’s homepage at University of Warwick De Beistegui, “The Political Honour of Psychoanalysis” talk at Warwick (2015) Relevant Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries: desire; recognition; Foucault Combahee River Collective Statement at Black Past Remembering Lauren Berlant (UChicago; Duke) Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights Wendy Brown, “Suffering Rights as Paradoxes” (2000) in Constellations

In this episode, Emily and John welcome John’s colleague Gary Kroll for a discussion of Jedediah Purdy‘s After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. We map the contours of the book, asking questions about the scope of the argument and both the promises and limits of its framework. Throughout we interrogate the concepts of the Anthropocene, humanism, the posthuman (are they incompatible??), and democracy, and ask what work the environmental imaginary does. In classic Always Already fashion, notions of scientific authority appear along with our favorite questions: what of capitalism, and wherefore art the feminist lens? And, how would an engagement with Indigenous cosmologies and politics transform Purdy’s own environmental imagination? Tune in to help us welcome our first guest holding the very official title Mother of Dragons!  Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes or Spotify. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here. Links: Purdy talk about After Nature at Duke in 2015 “The New Nature” forum at Boston Review Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock Kyle Whyte, “Indigenous environmental justice: Anti-colonial action through kinship“ Collected Murray Bookchin writings at the Anarchist Library William Cronon, Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature Past AAP episodes of note: James’ interview with JT Roane on plotting the Black Commons and the racial capitalocene; discussion of Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674368224 https://www.law.columbia.edu/faculty/jedediah-s-purdy

John is joined by friends-of-the-show Tyler Tully and Danielle Hanley to discuss Audra Simpson‘s Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Duke UP, 2014). The book — simultaneously a work of political theory, ethnography, and settler colonial studies — thinks with the Kahnawà:ke Mohawks to examine the situated production and assertion of Indigenous political subjectivities, membership(s), sovereignties, knowledges, practices, and much more. We talk through questions of a politics of refusal (and a politics of recognition and governance by settler states), ongoingness of settler colonialism (and how Simpsons confronts it), race and indigeneity (and why BIPOC might not be so great), Indigenous and settler epistemologies, dispossession and heteropatriarchy, the libidinal economy of white saviorism, and much more. Not to mention, there is extensive and extremely deserved dragging of John Locke. Are we in a post-, de-, and/or anti-colonial frame? Tune in to find out. And, stay tuned for the glorious return of giving advice to listener questions! We tackle a question about organizing notes, texts, sources, etc., which unsurprisingly becomes a sort of meditation on our own academic trajectories, peccadillos, and bugaboos. Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes or Spotify. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here. Links: Simpson’s homepage at Columbia Simpson’s 2016 Theory & Event article, “The State Is a Man: Theresa Spence, Loretta Saunders and the Gendered Costs of Settler Sovereignty” “Reconciliation and its Discontents: Settler Governance in an Age of Sorrow” lecture by Simpson Tyler Tully, “Epistemological Sacrifice Zones and the Decolonization of Religion“

This episode, Rachel and John have the honor and pleasure of interviewing Dr. Jane Anna Gordon and Dr. Drucilla Cornell about their new edited volume, Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg. Part of the Creolizing the Canon series, this volume examines the political economy and political philosophies of Polish Marxist thinker and revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, from her work on imperialism and the expanded reproduction of capital, to the violence of fascism, and her theory of primitive accumulation. The volume also considers her reception across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, asking how her work can be expanded and applied in contemporary revolutionary politics.\r\n\n\n\n\nAs you have may have guessed from our podcast series on Luxemburg and our episode on Geraldine Heng, Rachel, Sid, and John have a chapter in the volume! We rethink primitive accumulation as a concept for theories of racial capitalism. For more about the book, check out the book panel from the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung’s Rosa Luxemburg at 150: Revisiting Her Radical Life and Legacy conference from March 2021. \r\n\n\n\n\nWe begin by asking Gordon and Cornell about the concept of “creolization” and its relevance for the work of Luxemburg. Next we turn to ask about racism and capitalism, about social reproduction and Marxist feminism, and about how Rosa’s work points us to the co-constitutive nature of racism, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism. Finally, we ask what Rosa would think about theories of neoliberalism and contemporary forms of imperialism. Join us for this rich discussion of the creolized Rosa Luxemburg’s socialist horizons. \r\n\n\n\n\nRequests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes or Spotify. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here\r\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\r\n\n\n\n\nLinks:\r\n\n\n\n\nRosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung \r\nRed Rosa \r\n“History and Heartbreak: The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg” \r\nTrailer, Rosa Luxemburg (film)\r\n\n\n\n\n\n

In this episode, Emily and Rachel talk with the inimitable Eric Bayruns García, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Cal State San Bernardino, about two recent articles. Specializing in philosophy of race, epistemology, and Latin American philosophy, Bayruns García’s writing and teaching addresses racial injustice, colonialism, and epistemologies of ignorance, among other topics. In this episode we discuss two recent articles, “How Racial Injustice Affects News-Based Inferences,” in Episteme, and “Expression-Style Exclusion,” in Social Epistemology. We begin by discussing Bayruns García’s motivation for both articles and the research out of which they arise. Next, we delve into the difference between knowledge and understanding, and the implications of considering expression-style exclusion for the neoliberal university. We conclude by hearing Bayruns García’s thoughts about the stakes and implications of both pieces for radical politics and transformation. Tune in for this awesome conversation between giddily reuniting CUNY alums!\r\n\nRequests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.\n\nhttps://alwaysalreadypodcast.files.wordpress.com/2021/03/garcia.mp3\nLinks:\r\n\n\nEric’s website\r\n\nEric on the Philosophy in Color podcast\r\n\nAn interview with Eric on the APA blog\r\n\nStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries on philosophy of race, epistemology, and Latin American philosophy\r\n\nRace and Epistemologies of Ignorance, edited by Sullivan and Tuana\r\n\n\n \r\n\n\r\n\n

In this episode, Emily, James, and John enter the Worrisome World-Making of Disney () via How to Read Donald Duck, a 1971 Chilean Marxist critique of the American imperial-capitalist project of Disney, republished in 2018. Our trio approaches the book in form and content, and they discuss its social opposition through state censorship — whether as literal book-burning under the Pinochet regime or the banal violence of copyright infringement litigation in the United States — as well as praise the clarity of its cultural studies analysis of the Donald Duck comic strip (1938-1995). The comic, let us remind you, depicted the bourgeois imaginaries of the ne’er-do-well Donald Duck; his miserly ol’ Uncle Scrooge McDuck; everyone’s pal Daisy; our favorite triplets Huey, Dewey, and Louis; and all the aspiring burghers of Duckburg…and the realms beyond. Does the “fantasia” and “magic of Disney” truly serve to mystify the processes of primitive accumulation? Is Scrooge McDuck’s Monroe-Doctrine, Robber-baron aesthetic the farcical return of Hobbes’ Leviathan? What might the fetishization of gold teach children about the value of labor? Why are there only uncles and aunts in Duckburg? What happened to production, reproduction, labor, class, and social antagonism? What does Donald Duck make invisible, and what does it seek to make natural? Is Donald Trump Scrooge? Is the Marvel Cinematic Universe the bourgeois ideology machine of our time? Bonus: Find out why you should be simultaneously terrified of the acronym E.P.C.O.T. and grateful Walt Disney’s delusions of grandeur sank right back into the swampy Florida glades from which they sprung. Double bonus: critical mallard studies.   Always Already Medici Club patron Jason H requested we discuss this book, thank you Jason! Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.   https://alwaysalreadypodcast.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/donaldduck.mp3   Links: How to Read Donald Duck, OR Books Ariel Dorfman in the Guardian New Yorker review Defunctland: E.P.C.O.T. Donald Trump or Scrooge McDuck follow Zero Sum Empire podcast on Twitter Naomi Klein on the Chicago Boys in Chile Jean Baudrillard on Disney, Disneyland, and America, in “Simulacra and Simulations”    

Join Emily, B, Sid, and John for a classic AAP text discussion, this time featuring W.E.B. Du Bois’s Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil. Our discussion begins (perhaps unsurprisingly!) with knowledge, education, and epistemology, and spans Du Bois’s analysis of racial capitalism, his materialism, aesthetics, canonization as a political theorist, and more. We interrogate Du Bois as a democratic theorist in his own right, analyze his (maybe) humanism and (maybe) universalism, and ask, what does it mean to read DuBois as a prescient diagnostician of our own political moment (and who is the revolutionary subject?)? While we barely scratch the surface of all this book has to offer (what of “work,” whiteness, poetics, and proto-feminism in this text?!), we welcome you to join us for the close reading, and stay for the water puns! Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here. https://alwaysalreadypodcast.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/dubois-darkwater.mp3   Links: Gutenberg ebook of Darkwater NAACP biography of Du Bois Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Du Bois Du Bois Bibliography at the National Archives Keisha Blain on Du Bois, Pan-Africanism, and Anti-colonialism Farah Griffin on Black Feminists and Du Bois Ange-Marie Hancock on Du Bois and Intersectionality J. Phillip Thompson on “Capitalism, Democracy, and Du Bois’s Two Proletariats” Ella Myers on Du Bois and white sadism W.E.B. Du Bois in 1918; from WikiMedia Commons   First edition of Darkwater; from WikiMedia Commons

In this episode, John welcomes Jessica Blatt, Associate Professor of Political Science at Marymount Manhattan College, for a conversation about her 2018 book Race and the Making of American Political Science. What was political science’s role in shaping a de-radicalizing ‘race relations’ paradigm? How did the early discipline of political science turned to categories of ‘race’ in a bid for foundation funding and claims to scientific knowledge? What are the pedagogical implications for political scientists today of the book and of this genealogy of racism in the discipline? Tune in to explore these and other questions about a sometimes (read: frequently) ahistorical and not particularly self-reflective discipline). Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here. https://alwaysalreadypodcast.files.wordpress.com/2020/09/blatt-interview.mp3   Links: Follow Jessica Blatt on Twitter A 2019 interview with Blatt at the Society for U.S. Intellectual History A 2018 interview with Blatt on Detroit Today A 2018 talk by Blatt, “With a Little Help from our Friends: Scientific Racism and the Making of Modern Political Science“ Books mentioned: Leah Gordon, From Power to Prejudice: The Rise of Racial Individualism in Midcentury America; Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics; Alice O’Connor: Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History    

In this Epistemic Unruliness interview, James features Savanna Touré, Lincoln Mondy, and Amirio Freeman — the activists-creatives at the Empty Your Venmo Mutual Aid Fund for Black LGBTQ+ youth. The collective details their coming together within Washington, D.C. activist networks and highlights the distinction of their mutual aid/collective care mobilizations and their historic models from prevailing charity modes and non-profit/NGO strategies of social action. Far from merely offering material support, Empty Your Venmo “conjures audacity” by inspiring Black LGBTQ+ youth to dream lavishly of futurity, this institutional love praxis mirroring the intimacy that animates Lincoln and Amirio’s personal relationship. Not only will listeners of this episode learn more about the important work of Empty Your Venmo, but, with no shortage of kikis and giggity-goos, they’ll get the tea about Amirio’s experience as a student in the first class James ever taught, including the ways Amirio’s research on the house-ballroom community have informed Empty Your Venmo’s critical horizon of Black LGBTQ+ mutual aid. Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here. https://alwaysalreadypodcast.files.wordpress.com/2020/09/mutualaid.mp3 Links: Empty Your Venmo (slideshow presentation here) “MUTUAL AID NOW: Building Collective Care” webinar Freedom Fighters DC Advocates for Youth “Google Docs and Synced Calendars Are A Key Part Of Lincoln and Amirio’s Modern Relationship” Bumble profile

In this episode, James welcomes back friend of the podcast Joanna Steinhardt and introduces Tehseen Noorani, co-editors of the recent “The Psychedelic Revival” series published by the Society for Cultural Anthropology. From PTSD and opiate rehabilitation therapy, legalization and decriminalization initiatives, to “tech bro” microdosing and New Age spirituality eco-tourism, it seems that psychedlics are all the rage for everyone these days (including your Boomer parents!). But how did we get here? Join James, Joanna, and Tehseen as they bring you up to speed on the plant and fungal movements and trajectories making up this psychedelic revival in its various post-1971 iterations following President Nixon’s declaration of the U.S. government’s War on Drugs. But does heralding the “revival” of psychedelia eclipse the traditional contributions of Indigenous American and African pharmacopic knowledges? Or might the revival lead to a revolution of ancestral consciousness capable of rescuing us from the crises of racial capitalism and the Anthropocene? “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” and give a listen! Special thanks to Joanna and Tehseen for providing an extensive episode bibliography! Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here. https://alwaysalreadypodcast.files.wordpress.com/2020/08/psychedelic-revival.mp3   Links: Digital Media “The Psychedelic Revival,” Fieldsights series, Society for Cultural Anthropology Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) Johns Hopkins University Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research Website of Dr. Monnica T. Williams (also see Patricia Kubala’s profile of Dr. Williams in “The Psychedelic Revival” series) Oakland Hyphae, a self-described collective of “Oakland-based intersectional #mycology enthusiasts. 100% Black Owned” Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines Psymposia, “adversarial” investigative journalists working on a psychedelics and society beat Joanna’s 2016 Epistemic Unruliness interview on mycelial movements Joanna’s professional site Tehseen’s Durham University bio and Authority Research Network scholarship Books Giffort, Danielle. Acid Revival: The Psychedelic Renaissance and the Quest for Medical Legitimacy. Univ. of MN Press, 2020. Labate, Beatriz Caiuby and Clancy Cavnar, eds. Ayahuasca Shamanism in the Amazon and Beyond. Oxford UP, 2014. Langlitz, Nick. Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research since the Decade of the Brain. UC Press, 2012. Lattin, Don. The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America. Harper Collins, 2010. Letcher, Andy. Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom. Ecco, 2008. Richards, William A. Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences. Columbia UP, 2015. Saldanha, Arun. Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race. Univ. of MN Press, 2007 Shipley, Morgan. Psychedelic Mysticism: Transforming Consciousness, Religious Experiences, and Voluntary Peasants in Postwar America. Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.   Serotonin. Image by Kelsey Brooks, via Society for Cultural Anthropology: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/series/the-psychedelic-revival   via reddit user lysergic_serpent on r/lsd: https://www.reddit.com/r/LSD/comments/bb675s/ayahuasca_is_a_cruel_mistress/  

In this episode,James and John interview Joel Alden Schlosser about his new book Herodotus in the Anthropocene (University of Chicago Press, 2020). The trio accompany Herodotus on his inquiry through the Ancient Mediterranean world to run headfirst into a conversation about the urgency of twenty-first century climate catastrophe. What are the stakes of earthly flourishing when “the gods” and anthropos each access the powers of agency and destiny? How can the affect of wonder and the experience of mystery infuse our political ethics with humility? And what can we rediscover from Herotodus about the nature of law, custom, and culture that yet holds out hope for a pluralistic and verdant world composed of diverse peoples, topographies, and matrices of meaningfulness? Tune in as we discuss these questions, possible tensions between grappling with non-human actants and theorizing human activity, the covering-over of antiblack racism and settler colonialism in discourses of the Anthropocene (and how Herodotus can or cannot help us think through this), and much more. Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here. https://alwaysalreadypodcast.files.wordpress.com/2020/08/schlosser-interview.mp3   Links Schlosser’s homepage; follow Schlosser on Twitter Herodotus’s Histories available online at MIT Classics Schlosser on what teaching Herodotus and on “Life, Death, and Herodotus“    

In this episode, John and Sid are joined by friend of the podcast Danielle Hanley of Rutgers University to discuss Joel Olson’s The Abolition of White Democracy (2004). Our discussion weaves through a number of pressing questions: How does Olson center Du Bois in political theory debates about American democracy and citizenship? In what ways are Olson’s conceptualizations of “race,” “whiteness,” and “white privilege” precisely the kind of theorizations—politically astute, materially grounded, and non-reductive—that our moment calls for? What does Olson’s analysis of the constitutive relationship between race and American capitalism add to theories of racial capitalism? How does Olson’s vision of “abolition-democracy” expand democratic imaginaries and re-think agency and participation in critical race theory? Instead of turning to the work of Robin DiAngelo and Tim Wise, what if liberals interested in understanding and/or undoing “whiteness” read Olson’s prescient work? Across our conversation, we find that Olson’s elegant work speaks to our historical and political moment in multiple ways and has much to offer the left, theoretically and practically, within and beyond academia. Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here. https://alwaysalreadypodcast.files.wordpress.com/2020/08/olson.mp3   Links: Joel Olson archives, featuring academic and public writing, teaching materials, remembrances, and more Olson on white democracy and the 99% The Abolition of White Democracy at University of Minnesota Press    

In this episode, Emily is delighted to talk with Dr. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson about her new book Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. Turning to African diasporic literature, Jackson theorizes the relationship between blackness and animality, bringing black critical theory and posthumanism to bear on one another. Our conversation traces Jackson’s intellectual journey to the book project and to the question of animality more broadly, examines the methodological approaches of the book and the possibilities and poetics of language, and unpacks the project’s political stakes. On the way, we discuss plasticity, Jackson’s ontology, the importance of cultural production for theorizing the human, the relationship between science/positivism and colonialism, and more. Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here. https://alwaysalreadypodcast.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/zijackson.mp3   Links: Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s website and twitter Becoming Human at NYU Press Virtual book launch for the text hosted by NYU Press Interview with AAIHS on the book    

In this episode, Sid and John have the pleasure of talking with Dr. Michael Sawyer about his new book, Black Minded: The Political Philosophy of Malcolm X. Offering a systematic account of Malcolm X’s philosophy, Sawyer surfaces the distinctive radical humanism suffusing Malcolm X’s thought. Against the backdrop of ongoing anti-Black state and vigilante violence, we ask: What are the stakes of reading Malcolm X as a political philosopher, and what does it mean to be “Black minded”? How does Malcolm X theorize and practice the body as a site of Black subjectivity and self-sovereignty in the face of white supremacy, especially in white supremacy’s expression through the violent policing of Black bodies? In ways is Malcolm X a “bridge” between W.E.B Du Bois and Franz Fanon, and what do we learn from reading Malcolm X through Audre Lorde? What are the resonances and differences between Malcolm X’s conception of the New Human and the anti-humanism of Afro-pessimism? How should we grasp his often misunderstood notions of Black nationalism, violence, and revolution? Our conversation works though these pressing questions, clarifying the complexity, continued relevance, and radical horizon of Malcolm X’s political and philosophical critique of the white supremacist social order. We close with Sawyer’s reflections about contemporary struggles against white supremacy and the Black Lives Matter movement. Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Third Precinct on Fire“; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here. https://alwaysalreadypodcast.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/sawyer-interview.mp3   Links: Collected links of bail funds and legal aid project, organized by city Interview with Michael Sawyer about Black Minded by the Tree Pose Collective Colorado College’s write-up about this publication Malcolm X Project archives       Photo courtesy of Michael Sawyer   One of the images analyzed by Sawyer in the book. Photo originally by Bob Gomel/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images; sourced from http://fightland.vice.com/blog/cassius-x-when-muhammad-met-malcolm

In this very special episode, Sid and James sit down with Dr. Frank B. Wilderson, III for a lively and wide-ranging conversation about his new highly-anticipated book Afropessimism. Culminating much of Wilderson’s critical theoretical ouevre of the last twenty years, the trio discuss this coming-of-age narrative that chronicles Wilderson’s youthful journey via radical political movements in the US and South Africa and intimate relationships through which Wilderson came to realize his iconoclastic premises of Afropessimism: “Blackness is coterminous with Slaveness…[and] social death” (102). How does Afropressimism view the relation between the libidinal and political economies in generating and sustaining anti-Blackness? Are liberationist-abolitionist projects the ruse of the Human? Should one read Afropessimism as a slave narrative, in anticipation of aporia and oxymoron? And in an Always Already exclusive scoop for our listeners, Wilderson details the wild scene from one memorable night during his stint as a bouncer at Prince’s Minneapolis nightclub. Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Desiring Machines,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here. https://alwaysalreadypodcast.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/wilderson-interview-.mp3   Links: Frank B. Wilderson III’s webpage Paul Taylor’s review of Afropessimism Wilderson III’s interview about Afropessimism in The New York Times  Covid-19 and Afropessimism Wilderson III reads and takes questions on Afropessimism Links to earlier episodes that relate to this discussion: Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism; Frank B. Wilderson III’s Red, White, and Black; and Calvin Warren and Frank B. Wilderson III on Antiblackness, Nihilism, and Politics     via frankbwildersoniii.com/    

In this episode, Emily, John, and Sid are joined by friend of the podcast Danielle Hanley of Rutgers University for a discussion of the first half of Juliet Hooker’s 2009 book Race and the Politics of Solidarity. We ask, what is the promise of solidarity and how is it achieved? How does this argument sit differently in liberal theory against democratic theory? What work does the ontological claim of the book do? And it wouldn’t be an episode of the Always Already Podcast without the vulgar Marx question: what about class? Tune in for racial capitalism, whiteness, solidarity in the time of social distance, and more! Stay tuned for the dramatic return of your (our) two favorite segments: My Tumblr Friend from Canada (but actually from Europe) with an advice question on choosing thesis topics, and a new twist on dream analysis in One or Several (or zero?) Wolves! Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here. https://alwaysalreadypodcast.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/juliethooker.mp3   Links: “Is Solidarity the Key to Bridging the Racial Divide” (Hooker’s talk begins at 9:05) Entry on Multiculturalism and Liberalism in the Oxford Handbook APSA Presidential Taskforce Report on Racial and Class Inequalities by Alvin Tillery and Juliet Hooker. Chronicle of Higher Education report on the same. Interview on her latest book, Theorizing Race in the Americas (2017) South Atlantic Quarterly (open-access) issue edited by Barnor Hesse and Juliet Hooker, After #Ferguson, After #Baltimore: The Challenge of Black Death and Black Life for Black Political Thought Juliet Hooker (2016) in Political Theory, “Black Lives Matter and the Paradoxes of U.S. Black Politics: From Democratic Sacrifice to Democratic Repair”     via https://www.brown.edu/academics/political-science/about/people/faculty

In this episode focusing on the hazards of COVID-19, James interviews Dr. Sarmistha Talukdar, a queer, immigrant, neurodivergent audio-visual artist and a postdoctoral geneticist, and Jess Cowing, a PhD candidate working at the intersections of critical disability studies and settler colonialism. Jointly, Talukdar and Cowing are the organizers of the online workshop, “Chronic Illness and Mutual Care in Emergent Times: Preparing for COVID-19 and other Contagious Diseases,” which detailed the late public health crisis within an intersectional healing and disability justice frame that centers the experiences of those communities already held vulnerable and made unwell by the scarcity logic of capitalism and its asymmetrical distribution of resources and knowledge through the medical-industrial complex. How do we practice “social distancing” while mobilizing critical mutual care for our communities? And in an Anthropocene Age which has featured viral apocalypse since at least 1492, can we look through the prism of global pandemic towards the horizon of alternative futures and re-arrangements of our social relations, so that we might dream, imagine, and fantasize together about the world to come after capitalism? Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.   https://alwaysalreadypodcast.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/covid-decolonize.mp3   Links: COVID-19 Resources and Information Sheet (compiled by Cowing and Talukdar). Disability Justice Resources, Project LETS. Medical Industrial Complex Infographic, Leaving Evidence Blog. “COVID-19 (Coronavirus) Preparation for People Living with Chronic Illnesses in the United States,” Healing Justice Podcast. Marie Solis and Naomi Klein, “Coronavirus Is the Perfect Disaster for ‘Disaster Capitalism,’” VICE News. Johanna Hedva, “Sick Woman Theory,” Mask Magazine, Jan. 19, 2016. Prentis Hemphill, “Contagion, Consent, and Connection,” (former Healing Justice Director for Black Lives Matter Global Network). Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (2018)  

Emily, Sid, and John intervene in the resurgent and lively (and possibly trendy?) discussion on “racial capitalism.” By engaging with four articles–Michael Dawson’s (2016), “Hidden in Plain Sight: A Note on Legitimation Crises and the Racial Order“; Nancy Fraser’s (2016), “Expropriation and Exploitation in Racialized Capitalism: A Reply to Michael Dawson“; Ashley Bohrer’s (2018), “Intersectionality and Marxism: A Critical Historiography“; and Michael Ralph and Maya Singhal’s (2019), “Racial Capitalism“–the team interrogates the theoretical foundations and political stakes around the relationship between capitalism, racial domination, patriarchy, and other modalities of hierarchy and oppression. We raise questions (and often meet them with additional questions) such as: Is race necessary or contingent to the history and structure of capitalism? How, if at all, does contemporary work on racial capitalism move us past the entrenched class versus identity debate? Is the phrase “racial capitalism” an empty signifier, or does it hold generative political possibilities for the left? Tune in and find out where you end up on these questions and more! Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here. https://alwaysalreadypodcast.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/racialcapitalism.mp3 Links: The Combahee River Collective Statement Boston Review critical forum on slavery, capitalism, and justice Robin D.G. Kelley, video of “What is Racial Capitalism and Why Does It Matter?” lecture (2017) and essay on Cedric Robinson and racial capitalism Chapter 13 of Angela Davis’ Women, Race, and Class The Race and Capitalism Project at the University of Chicago Mayra Cotta on Michael Dawson, Nancy Fraser, race, and capitalism Video of Michael Dawson talk “Race, Capitalism, and the Current Crisis” (2019) Ashley Bohrer talk on “Capitalist Confinement” (2016) 2016 panel discussion on Race and Capitalism at U Chicago Michael Ralph discussing his book Forensics of Capital on Left on Black Found at: https://whatson.guide/2019/01/28/rethinking-racial-capitalism-with-gargi-bhattacharyya/