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On the occasion of MLK Day, I wanted to share a relatively recent text that’s profoundly impacted my thinking and actions: Stefano Harney & Fred Moten’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study.
Published in 2013 by Minor Compositions, a press that describes itself as “a series of interventions & provocations drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life,” The Undercommons is freely available in PDF form HERE via their generous Open Access policy. You can also support them buy purchasing a copy HERE.
As all of my favorite works of literature do, this book confounds and resists expectations at every turn. As J. Halberstam puts it in their introduction to the book, “Like all world-making and all world-shattering encounters, when you enter this book and learn how to be with and for, in coalition, and on the way to the place we are already making, you will also feel fear, trepidation, concern, and disorientation. The disorientation, Moten and Harney will tell you is not just unfortunate, it is necessary…” (pg. 11).
In its essays, dialogues, manifesto-like documents, this book, according to the publisher, “draws on the theory and practice of the black radical tradition as it supports, inspires, and extends contemporary social and political thought and aesthetic critique.”
For me, two of the most impactful concepts from this book arise from their critique of the university system and of political responsibility.
On the university, they write, “But certainly, this much is true in the United States: it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment” (pg. 26).
And in terms of their critique of political responsibility, I am emboldened by their rejection of preexisting structures in favor of reimagining the value of constant subversive fugitive activity that embraces the “delusional” and revolutionary potential of disruption and upheaval. “Politics is an ongoing attack on the common — the general and generative antagonism — from within the surround” (pg. 17).
If you’re interested in ways of rethinking your relationship to “politics,” your position in society, your role, your function, your possibilities for transformation, I highly recommend checking out Moten & Harney’s The Undercommons. It’s one of those texts that can change you.