friends, i am sorry again for the delayed newsletter. i returned to work at the school on thursday (i’m now working a reduced week, thurs and fri), and the rest of my time has been spent doing job applications. i’ve had very very little time to consume new content, let alone write a newsletter. so i’m afraid you’ll have to accept my sparse offerings here, for now, until i have more time at the weekend to cook up something more substantial.
big up to sam for sending over this excellent documentary on koiki mabo, an indigenous australian activist who won land rights for aboriginals in a landmark australian court case back in the 90s. genuinely fascinating, i was completely ignorant about australia’s indigenous peoples before watching this, and mabo is an extraordinary man. “mabo day” now falls on the 3rd june every year, hence sam sending me this rec.
it’s part of a larger australian documentary series on indigenous australians called the first australians, which can be found on youtube here. i plan to check out more of them soon.
next up, i found this cool google drive full of critical theory (with an anti-racism focus) on facebook. i started dipping into some of the fred moten stuff there yesterday but need to explore more. looks like an excellent theoretical archive.
finally, andrew key shared this 1972 article by a. sivanandan on “the liberation of the black intellectual” on twitter. really great exegesis on the tensions that come from crossing from “black” into the whiteness of the “intellectual”. good passage:
And accepting, he seeks to define. But black, he discovers, finds definition not in its own right but as the opposite of white. Hence in order to define himself, he must first define the white man. But to do so on the white man’s terms would lead him back to self-denigration. And yet the only tools of intellection available to him are white tools -white language, white education, white systems of thought – the very things that alienate him from himself. Whatever tools are native to him lie beyond his consciousness somewhere, condemned to desuetude by white centuries. But to use white tools to uncover the white man so that he (the black) may at last find definition requires that the tools themselves are altered in their use. In the process, the whole of white civilisation comes into question, black culture is re-assessed, and the very fabric of bourgeois society threatened.
this reminds me of a discussion we had in #16 about the ontology of the working class - how can the working class subject “speak” for itself when the only tools for “speaking” presented to it serve the interests of the ruling class, and thus further its subjugation, its lack of speech? this political dynamic between ontology and oppression is something i want to explore more on the blog in the coming months.
again, apologies for how rushed this is, i’m still working out how to adapt the newsletter to my current working conditions. and please send in recs, particularly ones with an anti-racist focus mentioned in the last newsletter. it could not be more important, and it’s an opportunity for us to collectively grow and improve ourselves.
much love
jake x