Throughout his corpus, Fred Moten insists on a unique temporality: sociality is always primary, both temporally and logically. Power arrives to individuate this primary sociality, dividing it into subjects, but it survives fugitively as a struggle against power. At numerous points in their work, Judith Butler also posits sociality as primary, but with a crucial difference: power's arrival enacts a totalizing constitutive force onto subjects, erasing any possibility of accessing the sociality that preceded and gave life to both power and subjects. This essay elaborates on this fundamental temporal disagreement between two of today's most influential critical theorists.
This introduction lays out the program undertaken by the Climate Change, Decolonization, and Global Blackness project (CCDGB) at Duke University’s Franklin Humanities Institute. Underway since 2022, the project has invited key speakers to converse with the Duke University community on the contexts and impact of climate change, embedding its understanding within the long durée history of global development engineered and sustained through 500 years of ongoing colonial modernity and modernization as the principal pathways to progress and development. CCDGB’s three interrelated critical themes allow us to rethink our relation to the planet—its human and more than human inhabitants and ecologies through the optic of its entangled histories, going beyond methodological nationalisms that bedevil analyses and privilege conceptual orientations based on a fictitious sense of separated geographies, topographies, histories and populations. The sample of essays contained here, reflecting the lively presentations and conversations, gesture to the urgency of thinking through notions of nonlinear time and inseparable (re)existences. The offering here gathers only the initial interlocutors of our project, which in the past 3 years has grown into an increasingly expanding intellectual community, but it nonetheless highlights and summarizes the range of themes, topics, questions, and methodologies that continue to guide CCDGB’s varied activities.
In Singapore, children's education is often presented as "an overriding and all-consuming concern," driven by intense competition for grades and school admissions (Waters, 2015: 290). However, the desire for academic excellence as a pathway to better lives is not as straightforward as it may seem. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Singaporean families, this paper explores parents' affective and productive labor in navigating the emerging tensions between aspirations for academic achievement on one hand, and school-life balance and happiness on the other. It examines how parents actively manage these conflicting aspirations, drawing on Lauren Berlant's (2011) concept of "cruel optimism"-a state marked by significant anxiety over the unfulfilled promises of modernity and neoliberalism. This is particularly evident in affective attachments to fantasies of "the good life," such as upward social mobility, job security, or freedom- understood as a "proactive, hopeful affective force that remains open and indeed seeks out possibilities for change" (Sotirin, 2020: 12). In examining how parents resist, (re)negotiate, and even reconcile these ambivalent aspirations regarding their children's education, this paper explores the affective landscape underpinning vigilance and the reconfiguration of upward social mobility.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on the upward social mobility of Latinx individuals in San Diego, this article explores how the adage "surround yourself with the right people" fosters vigilance and directs the attention of individuals aspiring to social ascent. This phrase acts as a call to develop social networks and engage in mentorship relationships to acquire skills deemed essential for success by experienced leaders. The paper finds that mentors play a crucial role in guiding aspirants toward cultivating a positive mindset, developing self-confidence, and building a supportive network. In doing so, mentors emphasize specific cultural traits described as Latinx characteristics-traits considered beneficial for success- and promote a collective commitment to empowering others. By highlighting the significance of skill development and social networks, this study shifts the focus from structural barriers to social mobility toward individual agency and community support. However, this perspective also exposes tensions and ambivalences, as aspirants must navigate class differences and balance personal ambitions with community expectations, often resulting in stress and conflicts of belonging.
Vigilantism in Africa is usually associated with upward mobility. Particularly in contexts of poverty and fragile state security, scholarship tends to frame it as a predatory project seeking power and resources. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with Koglweogo vigilante groups in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso's capital, this article challenges this perspective by exploring the Koglweogo's everyday struggle for advancement and reconstructing an incident resulting in the death of a prisoner. In unpacking the relationship between vigilantism, social mobility, and ethics in Africa, it argues that vigilantes can only achieve upward mobility if they continue to be recognised as moral selves despite their violence, and that their social ascent is always shadowed by the possibility of moral paralysis. Based on this insight, the article demonstrates that vigilantism is not merely a phenomenon that watches others, but that is also being watched, and therefore must carefully watch itself. It further concludes that social mobility is not only dependent on education, power, and networks, but also on moral practice.
In this introduction, we propose that people pursuing upward social mobility in uncertain and often adverse contexts must be watchful as a key condition of "moving up." We develop a conceptual framework that connects social mobility with vigilance-not in the narrow sense of state-driven surveillance, but as a broader constellation of watchfulness that aligns personal attentiveness with goals and responsibilities extending beyond individual advancement. In this sense, vigilance captures how aspiring individuals and groups monitor opportunities, manage risks, and navigate tensions in their pursuit of better lives. We examine social mobility through three key sites where vigilance and upward advancement intersect: education, family, and migration. Using vigilance as a conceptual lens allows us to illuminate the multifaceted dilemmas actors face as they strive for social advancement in contexts where belonging is contested, economic opportunities are constrained, and oppressive regimes persist.
This article shows the dynamics of social class mobilities and the middle classes’ strategic investments in social networks in Kenya. Taking a biographical view, I observe long-term dynamics on household, community, and regional levels, and argue that not only upward social mobility, but also continuance requires everyday practices of watchfulness. I argue that those who have accumulated decent financial, social, and cultural capital can navigate everyday life but must work hard to maintain these resources. Mistrusting the reliability of state security structures, Kenyans rely primarily on “traditional” community-organised security networks. For the middle classes, these networks are both a curse and a blessing: they must juggle opportunities as well as securities and solidarities; social networks are essential. Participating in privately organized circulations of resources thus remains the pivotal security system. However, as providers, individuals face a high risk of being overwhelmed by the demands from within these networks; as receivers, they face the risk of not gaining sufficient entitlements to resources for immediate or future needs.
Over recent years, Morocco and Tunisia have intensified efforts to fortify their respective border areas with Algeria, driven by the need for enhanced migration control and the fight against illicit trafficking and cross-border terrorism. These developments have significantly impacted communities living in border regions, disrupting long-standing economic and sociocultural structures. This article investigates how these border dynamics affect the daily lives of residents along the Morocco-Algeria and Algeria-Tunisia borders. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and more than 95 in-depth qualitative interviews, I explore how the border regimes in place affect the identity and security of 'borderlanders.' Additionally, I examine how the border population navigates the presence and enforcement of the state border, as well as the forms of resistance they develop. The findings show that, for border populations, a 'secure life' is closely tied to the permeability of the border and the opportunities it affords. Fortification efforts aimed at enhancing national security heighten feelings of isolation and uncertainty within border communities, as they restrict everyday mobility and arbitrarily fragment social life. In response to these challenges, border communities develop vigilant strategies, everyday geopolitical imaginaries, and a sense of belonging that challenges state-driven border policies and practices.
A university education offers a chance for upward mobility to many international students. This "moving up" is often encouraged by family networks both for economic and social reasons. International students are encouraged to look for high-ranking universities worldwide to seek improved socio-economic positionings. Once students get to their destination country, however, they may experience feelings of isolation. This paper examines how international students navigate their new environments-often characterised by limited socio-cultural and political-economic support and by the ambivalent nature of the relationships with both the communities of origin and their fellow students abroad. These groups may provide social assistance but can also be sources of social control, competition, or rivalry. To navigate such complexities, students must draw upon various rationalities, moralities, discourses, and practices, as they move between competing social norms. In this context, watchfulness may become an important attitude for inhabiting the social and the physical spaces of the study location, fostering various forms of individual vigilance in matters of affectivity, relationships, and moral conduct. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted with international students in Turin, Italy, this study looks at practices of vigilance, alertness and watchfulness, focusing on students' inner states, bodily expressions, family ties, community dynamics, and urban contexts. It contributes to the interdisciplinary debates by showing how these practices can ultimately lead to forms of suffering, while also fostering creative strategies that help reshape students' agency, subjectivities, and geographies.
My paper explores the (un)told stories of migrants who have returned from the United States to small-town Mexico, focussing on their strategies for (re)integration into their communities. Specifically, it examines how returnees navigate perceived status differences, expectations regarding upward social mobility, and questions of belonging. My research posits that returnees are subject to scrutiny in their everyday lives and are aware of this. I argue that, in response to being watched and often seen as 'different', returnees develop strategies of introspection and reflection. The stories they choose to tell-or withhold-about their lives in the United States are shaped not only by their individual migratory experience but also by their perception of how they are viewed by others in their communities. This paper highlights how returnees attune themselves to their social environment by either articulating or withholding their migration experience as they navigate their new social realities.
This essay considers the role of the political right in managing the politics of the climate crises of U.S. capitalism. We confront in the U.S. a political situation in which no major party has even attempted to lay out a credible roadmap to address the scale of the climate crisis. Rather, they are pouring fuel on the fire, despite the fact that majorities want climate action and despite the cries of frontline communities, movements, and scientists around the world documenting the extreme, racialized, gendered, and class-based violence of both planetary warming and the fossil fueled economy that engenders it. To make sense of this moment, I take direction from Aim & eacute; C & eacute;saire's trenchant analysis of the post-WWII transitionary period in which our present crises acquired their modernized form, and Laura Pulido et al.'s (2019) concept of "spectacular racism."
Through three scenes in the U.S. South, this article traces alternate histories surrounding U.S. forests through Black ecological practices for spiritual sustenance and refuge from slavery. The rich density and network of forest landscapes created possibilities for Black liberation separable, if still arising from, plantations as the dominant moral, social, and economic framework for the United States' domestic and globalized lifeways. The burgeoning literature in Black Ecologies signals the importance of Afro-diasporic relations with ecosystems representing the intimate complexities of violent extraction via slavery and simultaneous possibilities for sustenance and freedom. Setting aside forest conservation, one pillar of Western environmentalism, a Black Ecologies approach to forests de-commodifies these ecosystems as bundles of resources and reestablishes them as a life-giving geographies offering the possibility of worlds beyond property, plantation, and profit.
This is an initial mapping of the elements that must be in place for a discursive presentation of current global catastrophes-climate crisis, migration, pandemics, and criminalization-that generates a political response rather than the apathy and cruelty that abounds. The focus is on the intuitive, where, to sense with 'the body' and with 'the mind' are indistinguishable; where sensation, intuition, imagination come together. The pivotal question is how to address the effects of colonial, and racial subjugation without activating the Kantian categorial force, that the racial yields as a modern construct. The racial effectively nullifies the juridical-economic as the site to address how the others of Europe and their territories fare in today's global economy. As a response to what that question demands, I speculate on the sense of the ancestral, as in the basic quantic components of all that exists and have been around for billions year, to highlight the fact that inseparability exists not at the level of the molecule but in the constitutive (elemental) particles, which are continuously recycled through transduction, transition, and transformation.
This article critiques the conceptual adequacy of the concepts anthroprocene, capitalocene, and plantationocene. In their place, it proposes an historical approach to the interrelated histories of capitalism, the plantation, slavery, and nature in the Americas from the perspective of commodity production. It treats plantations as historically specific combinations of land, slave labor, and productive technology. Plantations are formed and reformed through the successive creation of new commodity frontiers, which are themselves integral to the historical expansion of capitalism. Focusing on the productive structure of the sugar plantation, this article traces its transformations through the successive construction of commodity frontiers in 16th century Brazil, 17th British and French Caribbean, and 19th century Cuba.
On September 10, 2023, Storm Daniel pummeled the coast of Libya. The resulting catastrophe of infrastructural damage and the collapse of two dams led to the loss of lives estimated by some sources to near 20,000 people. The scale of devastation and extensive reach of flooding raises many questions surrounding aging colonial infrastructure such as dams, exacerbating climate events and the increasing vulnerability of contemporary migrancy alongside sedentary populations in low lying flood plains across the world. The essay takes the case study of Derna to foreground themes and issues shared by postcolonial states around the world whose failing infrastructures are accompanied by intensifying climate events impacting vulnerable populations along their pathways.
In this essay I review Achille Mbembe Critique of Black Reason by offering a critical analysis through both postcolonial and earlier Enlightenment thought on notions of reason and critique. The review concludes by arguing that Mbembe’s narrow focus on specific Black populations to speak for the whole of the world, and the lack of discussion on gender and sexuality render an otherwise promising project with few applicable or actionable concepts.
Skeletons of enslaved Africans were exhumed by Hurricanes Iris, Luis, and Marylin in 1995 in Guadeloupe, and by Hurricane Dean and Hurricane Gamède in 2007 in Martinique and in Réunion respectively. In the case of the Caribbean Island of St Eustatius, bones of enslaved Africans were not unearthed by the ocean, hurricanes, and climate change, but were discovered in 2021 near an airport on the site of a former plantation. Thus, this article proposes a transoceanic analysis of the ways in which an emotional landscape and archeological studies trigger a different understanding of enslavement, mourning, and ancestral anxiety for the African diaspora in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. The article unpacks how memory communities, activists, and grassroots organizations create new memorializing grammars and work through the resurfacing trauma of slavery by unsettling entangled archives and silences of history, crafting symbolic burial ceremonies, envisioning new oceanic epistemologies of refusal and transforming tortured geography into decolonial therapeutic spaces. Forging the notions of “tidalectical archives” and “climate of theory”, the author crosspollinates trauma and resilience, implicated archeologists, implicated descendants, embodied experiences, creative spiritual art, critical fabulation, and geopolitical re-appropriations of the skeletons of the enslaved. The author further posits a reimagination of epistemological platforms and methodologies to assess the entanglements of climate crises in social and geographical contexts where historical trauma is caused by the enslavement of nature and the enslavement of people through nature.
This article reflects on the possibilities of a pedagogy of socioenvironmental listening grounded in land-based struggles and inter-epistemic dialogues. Drawing from encounters with three interlocutors in the Brazilian Amazon, I share reflections that address the entanglement between socioenvironmental crisis and the crisis of knowing within diverse institutional academic contexts. The article focuses on conversations and singing encounters that highlight tensions between academic knowledge systems and ancestral, territorial ways of knowing, sensing and responding to socioenvironmental pressures in the Volta Grande do Xingu and Lower Tapajós regions. Centering the relationship between listening, belonging, and pedagogy, I explore the challenges that arise when moving between territories, academic spaces, and places where struggles for land shape everyday life. Thinking-feeling my dialogue with these interlocutors and engaging with scholars of colonial histories of listening and counter-colonial archives, I argue for the centrality of sustained attunement to belonging in decolonial research. Belonging here is not a fixed position, but a complex web of reciprocal relations, limits, and commitments.
We examine if and how museums contribute to unravelling the fabric of settler colonialism in Canada and take them into view as institutions of the colonial education system: schools, universities and museums play key roles in constructing and spreading certain collective narratives and images, and in silencing others. While all states employ “imagined communities” to legitimate and reproduce the existing order, in colonial states this often includes images and narratives that emphasize the greatness of the colonizers as bringers of civilization. The violence perpetrated by colonization is usually left out. This is the case in Canada as well and is in stark contrast to the epistemic and structural violence that became established with colonial settlement. Our research investigated Canadian universities and museums’ efforts in working through their share in this colonial power system. Being key agents in general education, they select what and whose knowledge is in- or excluded but also have the potential to address conventionally learned misconceptions or distorted images. Canada started its official journey towards “reconciliation” in 2015. We ask whether and how museums take this up: What are they contributing to the declared effort to tackle the colonial system – of which they are a part? Results are presented from an online analysis of how universities and museums across Canada engage in communication strategies surrounding coloniality before we zoom in on museums and focus in more detail and in comparison, on how the Museum of Vancouver created a special space to grapple with the situation.
