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.