Short Abstract:

This roundtable considers how Harney and Moten’s notion of the undercommons speaks to anthropological reflections on un/commoning. We pose this as a roundtable in order to enable dialogue–closely engaged with Harney and Moten’s text as well as with participants’ own courses of fieldwork and study.

Long Abstract:

This roundtable takes up the question of how Harney and Moten’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013) could speak to anthropological reflections on un/commoning. Harney and Moten invoke radical traditions of Black study in order to thematize forms of being together that are neither simply “for” nor “against” dominant institutions–the university, the bank, the police, the state, to name a few–but which rather exist in their shadows, exceed, and escape them. They imagine this under the name of “the undercommons,” a figure of thought and fugitive practice from which other ways of being human could emerge. Thinking with the undercommons provides an occasion to bring older arguments about the commons and enclosure as well as more recent discussions of uncommoning into confrontation with reflections on anti-Blackness, white supremacy, racial capitalism, and what is possible despite it all. In this roundtable, we invite participants to reflect on ways in which the undercommons and its attendant forms of “speculative practice” (Harney and Moten) and “critical fabulation” (Hartmann) deepen or challenge anthropological reflections on the commons and uncommoning. We pose this as a roundtable specifically in order to enable dialogue–both closely engaged with Harney and Moten’s text as well as with participants’ own courses of fieldwork and study.

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