Situating Ruptures: Indigenous Resurgence and the Frankfurt School as Non-Repressive Epistemological Alternatives to the Imperial Paradigm

Erin Chewter

Abstract

This paper explores epistemic responses to rupture (broadly defined as a neutral force of change) and their effects on relational paradigms. Totalizing paradigms respond fearfully to rupture via a self-perpetuating cycle of repression and domination, whereby the movement from one stage to the next is facilitated through instrumental reason, that is, through self-(pre)serving knowledge practices. Such a cycle, which I term deracination, is necrotic in its leveraging of violence to sever all forms of life-sustaining relationships, and the psychological domination it enforces can render the possibility of escape unfathomable. Despite this, the emergent decolonial tradition of Indigenous Resurgence theory refuses all colonial/capitalist disruptions to Indigenous relationships. Similarly, in the mid-twentieth century, the German-Jewish scholars of the Frankfurt School refused to accept the alleged inevitability of modernity’s exponentially accelerating fragmentation of human relationships (as epitomized in the totalizing ideologies of capitalism, fascism, and Stalinism). 

What is so special about these two distinct responses to deracination? How are they related, and what does this tell us about how to interrupt totalizing cycles of dominating rupture and repressive response? To answer this query, the present paper begins with an articulation of rupture as a conceptual framework for understanding relationally driven change over time. It then moves to situate each theoretical tradition within such a framework. Key writings by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, will be interwoven with the insights of scholars from a wide range of Indigenous nations across North America towards elucidating the mechanisms of a deracinating imperial paradigm, various tactics for refusing its violent mode of (anti)relation, and some core features of non-repressive epistemologies capable of responding to the dynamic flux of inter-relational tensions without recourse to violence. I argue that the Frankfurt School and Indigenous Resurgence traditions are both distinctly non-repressive epistemological responses to traumatic ruptures, and that these responses interrupt and suspend totalizing, necrotic rupture cycles through their respective tactics of generative refusal, that is, through the integration, or re-situation of rupture as a creative and life-affirming force. The epistemological approach of first-generation Frankfurt School Critical Theory is shown to possess several crucial points of compatibility with Indigenous epistemologies. The holistic, relational, self-reflexive, and theistic inclinations demonstrated throughout their writings suggest that the Frankfurt School’s approach to critique might be a well-suited and culturally appropriate theoretical launching point for Euro-American scholars seeking to work in tandem with Indigenous Resurgence theorists towards generatively refusing anti-relational, delocalized modes of knowing and being in the world.

Whose Trust? Anti-Asian Racism and the Technologic of Dis/Trust in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Noah Khan

Abstract

The present paper examines the phenomenon of anti-Asian racism in the COVID-19 pandemic and its implications on the structure of trust. Drawing on studies completed after the pandemic began, anti-Asian racism is viewed across multiple technological structures. The paper begins with late 1800’s U.S.A., examining race-based exclusion laws, drawing the present pandemic in relation to depict the ways in which the evolution of technology has changed the very way trust is structured. Studies on technological phenomena such as bots and social media anonymity are consulted to demonstrate the structural turn in the network of trust to one of blurred parties. The disadvantages of this network, finding form in various social media, are explored through multiple studies on the effects on Asian American mental health and the increase in the Asian/White mental health gap. Examination of such a network, wherein anonymous hate can exist in large quantities, suggests that dis/trust is becoming universalized in that a victim of hate can no longer identify between whom their trust has been broken, leading to general anxiety, fear, and depression. Implications are then drawn to examine the ways in which technological change effects conceptual change. After a conceptual analysis of connection through a technological lens, the present paper concludes with suggestions for how we might ethically engage with a network of trust such as the one presented. As individuals, there is great impetus created to publicly express counter-hate without anonymity, so that networks of trust can be mapped for victims.

Multidimensional Autonomy: Socio-Political and Temporal Dimensions of Autonomy

Kawthar Fedjki

Abstract

The implications of personal autonomy not existing within a vacuum requires consideration of the social, relational and temporal implications. These dimensions of autonomy can inform the larger context of oppression faced by individuals, as their impact can be analyzed on both an individual and mutual manner. Through application of the internalist and externalist positions of relational autonomy, these analyses can be conducted with regards to the impact of these dimensions on autonomy to understand the extend of the effect of oppression. The example of the Retro Woman, contrasted with Marina Oshana’s Taliban Woman, will demonstrate how oppression faced by women can be observed from their socio-political identity and context along the temporal axis, and persist even after they are removed from the context wherein the oppression originated. By analyzing the hypothetical case from the perspective of established frameworks of relational autonomy, such as those presented by John Christman and Oshana, it demonstrates how they may not be well-placed to account for all of these dimensions and their impact on autonomy.

Creaturely Realism, the Critique of Property, and the Climate Crisis

Ishaan Alexander Selby

Abstract

In her monograph Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question Benedicte Boisseron signals a new possibility for theories of animality, arguing that the decade long explosion in critical animal studies “offers a unique chance to take an in-depth look at the modern impact of a historically grounded system of mutual racialization and animalization.” In order to take advantage of this chance, I put forward an analytic I call creaturely realism to read together the intersections between critical animal studies and forms of minority discourse as a rethinking of the Anthropocene. I use this analytic of creaturely realism to put critiques of the human from animal studies, Black studies, queer theory and eco-feminism in conversation, suggesting that this dialogue fundamentally changes the scope and focus of critical animal studies from a post-structuralist emphasis on the philosophical canon to relations of sovereignty, marginalization and domination. The animal is thus read as a complex formation of animalization, racializing assemblages and sexual difference with the political possibility of alliance between subjects excluded from the purview of the human. These political possibilities allow a reconsideration of the conceptual schema of the Anthropocene. I follow Claire Colebrook and Donna Haraway in their insistence that standard forms of human uniqueness are increasingly unavailable to us on the brink of climate disaster and so for the extinction of anthropocentric modes of being. I join their work to emergent postcolonial engagements with the climate crisis and the concept of the Anthropocene. I argue for the central importance of an interspecies minority discourse, less in bringing us back from the brink to a renewed humanism and more thinking beyond the horizon of humanity to new possible worlds. 

Book Review : Ugly Freedoms, Elizabeth R. Anker

Tia Glista

Tia Glista read and reviewed Elisabeth R. Anker’s book Ugly Freedoms with their feminist theory reading group which she co-runs. Her review provides insight into how Anker rethinks and retools meanings of ‘freedom’ in American political theory, art, and popular culture, working closely with Black studies, postcolonial theory, gender studies, and ecocriticism.