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- Convenors:
-
Melody Howse
(Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Tyler Zoanni (University of Bremen)
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- Format:
- Roundtable
- Transfers:
- Closed for transfers
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.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Contribution short abstract:
My contribution discusses the parellels between the critical intellectual in the University and the decolonial practitioner in the German museum landscape. I then share my experience and artistic practice of using fabulation to engage otherwise with colonial spaces and museum collections.
Contribution long abstract:
In “The University and the Undercommons” Moten and Harney discuss the importance of being neither for nor against Universitas, but rather of creating alternative modes of engagement that both undermine and supplant it. In this contribution, I trace parallels between their portrayal of the critical intellectual within the University, and the decolonial practitioner within the museum landscape in Germany today: where institutions devoted to displaying colonial-era loot invite-then-coopt critical perspectives as a way to virtue-signal while simultaneously sidestepping calls for reparation, repatriation, etc. Drawing ethnographic insight from my artistic practice— including my own choices about whether and how to accept or refuse such invitations—I reflect on the uses of speculation and "critical fabulation" within my films "Rosenfelde" and "The Memory Guardians," as a means of redirecting institutional resources towards opening up alternative ways of engaging colonial spaces and “toxic monuments” respectively.
Contribution short abstract:
I reflect on how Harney and Moten’s notion of “study” as a distinctive intellectual and political practice neither simply exists “for or against” other forms of knowing called “theory” and “fieldwork”, but nonetheless scrambles some of their basic assumptions and aspirations.
Contribution long abstract:
I attend to Harney and Moten’s notion of “study” as a distinctive intellectual and political practice inspired by traditions of Black radicalism. I reflect on how study neither simply exists “for or against” other forms of knowing frequently called “theory” and “fieldwork”, but nonetheless scrambles some of their basic assumptions and aspirations. I try to make sense of the ways that study is neither simply solitary (uncommon) nor solidary (common) but instead arises from the something else Harney and Moten call the undercommons. I consider what study as a way of life might mean for these organized and institutionalized “fields” some of us exist at once inside and outside: namely, anthropology and the university. I wonder about the possibilities and limits of study in these fields insofar as they are structured by logics of white supremacy and anti-Blackness.
Contribution short abstract:
In this roundtable I reflect on the practice of gathering in spaces that are not invested in your survival and how this reaching forward nurtures a commons, one found in the undercommons.
Contribution long abstract:
Gathering has always had the capacity to wield the illicit edge of subversion, whether that was gathering in the clearing, in the basement or in the library. Moten and Harney’s ‘Undercommons Fugitive Planning & Black study’ reminds us of the radical practice that gathering is, and the potential it creates for a commons to emerge, one which is neither for or against but recognises that which has been refused and in turn refused by us. Within the field of anthropology, these spaces rarely exist, infrequently have I found myself being gathered, or arrived within a gathering that created the energy to perpetuate change. Yet, within this space we all exist if only we could see each other, if only the institution and its forms and practices didn’t stand in our way clouding our eyes. Therefore, in this roundtable I reflect on the practice of gathering in spaces that are not invested in your survival and how this reaching forward nurtures a commons, one found in the undercommons.
Contribution long abstract:
The concept of the Undercommon by Harney and Moten (2013) offers a fresh lens for understanding my research on contemporary forms of enclosure shaped by neoliberal urban governance and security doctrines. I drawing on ethnographic anecdotes from spaces at the margins of the formal economy, a privileged space of the undercommons. I explore the emergence of 'speculative practices'—both in how transnational actors experiment with security mechanisms and in how urban dwellers respond to, support, and subvert these mechanisms in their daily lives. In doing so, this reflection will contribute to ongoing debates about the tensions and possibilities of contemporary urban Un/commoning.
Contribution short abstract:
I aim to reflect critically on my academic and personal work with Black and African diaspora groups in Germany. If neither the university nor civil society organizations are structurally capable of producing the world we want, how do we work beyond them, even as we labor within them?
Contribution long abstract:
For academics and organizers committed to building knowledge that can radically disrupt anti-blackness, the threat and promise of professionalization hangs heavy, a problematic described at length in The Undercommons. Becoming a professional and demonstrating a competency that is legible to the state or the university offers funding and resources desparately needed by forgotten and marginalized communities, transformed into education, healthcare, food, housing. Professionalization, however, also comes with the risk of losing sight of modes of being in the world beyond its current model of perpetual precarity, Professional organizers and academics acquire grant funds with quantifible measures of progress while the aim of escaping this cycle of scarcity is set aside. If neither the university nor civil society organizations, which Harney and Moten call the “laboratories” and “research and development arm” of governance (56), are structurally capable of producing the world we want, how do we work beyond them, even as we labor within them? What can we learn from those who organize for the undercommons, in the shadows of the university and the state? In this roundtable I aim to reflect critically on my academic and personal work with Black and African diaspora groups in Germany. I draw inspiration from those individuals and organizations who build undercommon futurities, actively re-imagining ways of living together and putting into practice the otherwise world-making described by Harney and Moten.