Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 2022
In an interview with Mavis Nicholson in 1987, James Baldwin said: “Black people need witnesses in... more In an interview with Mavis Nicholson in 1987, James Baldwin said: “Black people need witnesses in this hostile world, which thinks everything is white”. Baldwin’s statement invokes the witness as one who bears a responsibility to the violence that renders Black life vulnerable to premature death. But what is it to bear witness in a world structured by anti-Blackness? This paper charts a relation between the 1992 beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers and the 2020 killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, asking why such the mediated witnessing of such moments of racialized state violence regularly fail to provoke an ethico-juridical crisis for the state. Against the idea that the ubiquity of mobile media – from smartphones and platform media to police dash-cams and body-cams – produce greater levels of police oversight and accountability, the paper argues that the scene of witnessing is structured by a racialized perception of the human which creates a situation in which artefacts of witnessing are challenged and contested. Drawing on Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s notion of “the crisis state” and Judith Butler’s articulation of a “racially saturated field of visibility”, the paper explores the limits of the figure of the witness and offers a critique of techno-fixes to state-sanctioned anti-Blackness such as body-worn cameras. Against the presumption of the witness as an objective conduit of truth, the paper reads the work of the artist Arthur Jafa, whose video works Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death and The White Album stage a confrontation with a visual field structured by racism and suggest an articulation of the human in excess of liberal subjectivity.
This article argues that property law can be understood as a key infrastructure of settler-coloni... more This article argues that property law can be understood as a key infrastructure of settler-colonial sovereignty. Rather than a simple importation of British law, the frontier mentality of the colonial outpost allowed for the implementation of a new legal framework for the allocation and registration of land. Taking the example of Torrens Title allows for an analysis of the 'structures of feeling' that are generated by, and that naturalise in turn, the possessive claim to property. We consider how the history of property as fungible commodity is entangled with the history of racialisation, and how Torrens Title shows the material and affective dimensions of settler law and of the long struggle to resist its illegal claim to sovereignty. We analyse the 2018 video essay Drawing Rights by Rachel O'Reilly, considering the troubled relationship between white possession and the unbroken sovereignty it denies, yet which remains a constant threat to the settler state. Her work articulates what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls ‘infrastructures of feeling’, which, we argue, describes the way anti-colonial consciousness can materialise against structures and attachments of settlement.
Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning (CriSTaL), 2022
This paper begins by considering the state of higher education in Australia, following structural... more This paper begins by considering the state of higher education in Australia, following structural changes facilitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. We consider the longer-term effects of neoliberal ideology on the sector, charting the way that ongoing crises of/in higher education work to co-opt university workers and students into a position in which they are required to defend the idea of the university as a site of enlightenment. We then discuss the erosion of funding in the arts and argue that in concert with the diminished resourcing of the university, ad hoc social spaces within contemporary art have become temporary communities for study. We analyse a project of our own-Endless Study, Infinite Debt-which seeks to engage in the collective study of infrastructure, settlement, and racial capitalism. We consider how the university and art might be ambivalently engaged to practise forms of care and study against privatisation/professionalisation and towards solidarity.
This essay builds on various critiques of the relationship between the voice and autonomous indiv... more This essay builds on various critiques of the relationship between the voice and autonomous individual subjectivity, briefly tracking the specific history through which the voice transformed into an ideal object representing the liberal subject of post-Enlightenment thought. This paper asks: what are we to make of those enfleshed voices that do not conform to the ideal voice of the self-possessed liberal subject? What are we to make of those voices that refuse the imperative of improvement that underpins social and economic contractualism? How might we attend to the sonicity of those voices that refuse to individuate, possess, and accumulate? And what fugitive modes of speech might be transmitted by such unformed and unorganized voices? Against the idealized voice of liberalism, and the gendered and racialized exclusions that this voice implies, I propose a mode of fugitive listening that allows us to open our ears to the noisy voices and modes of speech that sound outside the locus of politics proper. Indebted to the Black radical tradition, fugitive listening attends to sonic practices that refuse the given grounds of representation. I argue that fugitive listening is a practice that can be situated in what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call 'the undercommons'. The essay concludes by turning to gossip, figuring this noisy modality of speech as central to undercommon spaces shaped by Black performance.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police has spark... more In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police has sparked protests and riots around the world. The policing of the pandemic reveals the racial biases inherent to law enforcement and state-led discipline, laying bare ongoing infrastructural inequalities that render racialized subjects more vulnerable to premature death at the hands of police and public health systems alike. With the video embedded in the article, we guide readers through thirty-nine seconds of rioting in Los Angeles on May 31, 2020, shot on a mobile phone and circulated virally on Twitter. The affected body of the witness indexes both the intensity of the event and the embodied experience of the witness, establishing a relation between the two. The experiential aesthetics of the video exceeds the content and this affectivity circulates with its mediation and movement through networked platforms. Such forms of affective witnessing allow for an attunement to political struggle that occurs through what Hortense Spillers would call the analytic of the flesh. Thinking at the intersection of Black studies, affect theory, and media studies, we argue that the flesh is an affective register crucial to the building of global anti-racist solidarities towards abolition.
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 2021
In this paper we take up the concept of the ‘chorus’ as explored by Saidiya Hartman in Wayward L... more In this paper we take up the concept of the ‘chorus’ as explored by Saidiya Hartman in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. In that book, Hartman imagines the chorus as a collective expression of resistance and survival – the sound of many voices speaking out and speaking up. We argue that the concept of the chorus can be understood in Marxist terms as an expression of surplus population, and as such, is always provoking crisis. We consider surplus popula- tions in relation to three historic moments of upheaval and resis- tance, and the representation of these events (or lack thereof): the riot of Black girls at the Bedford Hills Reformatory in 1919; cafeteria riots led by trans, queer, and gender non-conforming people in the 1950s and 1960s in California; and the 2004 Palm Island riot that irrupted in the wake of the death of Mulrunji Doomadgee. In each case, the riots (and their expression in the form of a chorus) responded directly to aggressive policing and the violence of the state. These riots are not merely about responding to the violence of policing but also about defending that irreducible and genera- tive excess that might variously be described as Blackness, queer- ness, and Indigeneity.
This paper considers the relationship between sound and the structural violence of whiteness in t... more This paper considers the relationship between sound and the structural violence of whiteness in the context of the Australian settler colony. It thinks with an archive of audio recordings made by the Manus Recording Project Collective, a group of men currently or formerly held in involuntary and indefinite detention after seeking asylum in Australia, and their collaborators in Melbourne. Tracking the demonisation of refugees in the media and party politics over the past two decades, I develop the notion of the white sonic field as a way of accounting for the way both sound and perception are racially saturated in the settler colony. The sonic field, which comprises both the sounds we hear and the forces that mediate our hearing, is crucial to the maintenance of whiteness in the settler state, structuring perception and naturalising settlement through the repetition of possessive speech acts and the selective silencing of non-white voices. Cutting through the white sonic field are recordings from the where are you today archive produced by the Manus Recording Project Collective. I argue that these recordings reclaim the right to representation, moving beyond both the erasure of refugees and spectacle of their suffering. These recordings compel us to listen beyond the border and beyond the white sonic field, asking us to consider how we might dismantle the carceral system of mandatory and indefinite detention.
A review of essay of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories o... more A review of essay of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
The Art of Laziness: Contemporary Art and Post-Work Politics, 2020
A critical examination of racist representations of Indigeneity in the settler colony of Australi... more A critical examination of racist representations of Indigeneity in the settler colony of Australia and the role such representations play in the legitimation of colonial violence. The chapter considers tactics of refusal employed by First Nations artists
A paper that examines the concept of gossip, considering it not only as a way of speaking but als... more A paper that examines the concept of gossip, considering it not only as a way of speaking but also as a way of composing and reading texts—broadly speaking, gossip as a textual modality. The paper begins by introducing gossip in critical terms and finishes by reading works by Clare Milledge, Vincent Namatjira and Vernon Ah Kee as gossip.
Permanent Recession: A Handbook on Art, Labour and Circumstance, 2019
An essay on colonial archives and the creation of counter-archives artwork of D Harding. Original... more An essay on colonial archives and the creation of counter-archives artwork of D Harding. Originally published in Runway. Republished in Permanent Recession: A Handbook on Art, Labour and Circumstance.
Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 2022
In an interview with Mavis Nicholson in 1987, James Baldwin said: “Black people need witnesses in... more In an interview with Mavis Nicholson in 1987, James Baldwin said: “Black people need witnesses in this hostile world, which thinks everything is white”. Baldwin’s statement invokes the witness as one who bears a responsibility to the violence that renders Black life vulnerable to premature death. But what is it to bear witness in a world structured by anti-Blackness? This paper charts a relation between the 1992 beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers and the 2020 killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, asking why such the mediated witnessing of such moments of racialized state violence regularly fail to provoke an ethico-juridical crisis for the state. Against the idea that the ubiquity of mobile media – from smartphones and platform media to police dash-cams and body-cams – produce greater levels of police oversight and accountability, the paper argues that the scene of witnessing is structured by a racialized perception of the human which creates a situation in which artefacts of witnessing are challenged and contested. Drawing on Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s notion of “the crisis state” and Judith Butler’s articulation of a “racially saturated field of visibility”, the paper explores the limits of the figure of the witness and offers a critique of techno-fixes to state-sanctioned anti-Blackness such as body-worn cameras. Against the presumption of the witness as an objective conduit of truth, the paper reads the work of the artist Arthur Jafa, whose video works Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death and The White Album stage a confrontation with a visual field structured by racism and suggest an articulation of the human in excess of liberal subjectivity.
This article argues that property law can be understood as a key infrastructure of settler-coloni... more This article argues that property law can be understood as a key infrastructure of settler-colonial sovereignty. Rather than a simple importation of British law, the frontier mentality of the colonial outpost allowed for the implementation of a new legal framework for the allocation and registration of land. Taking the example of Torrens Title allows for an analysis of the 'structures of feeling' that are generated by, and that naturalise in turn, the possessive claim to property. We consider how the history of property as fungible commodity is entangled with the history of racialisation, and how Torrens Title shows the material and affective dimensions of settler law and of the long struggle to resist its illegal claim to sovereignty. We analyse the 2018 video essay Drawing Rights by Rachel O'Reilly, considering the troubled relationship between white possession and the unbroken sovereignty it denies, yet which remains a constant threat to the settler state. Her work articulates what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls ‘infrastructures of feeling’, which, we argue, describes the way anti-colonial consciousness can materialise against structures and attachments of settlement.
Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning (CriSTaL), 2022
This paper begins by considering the state of higher education in Australia, following structural... more This paper begins by considering the state of higher education in Australia, following structural changes facilitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. We consider the longer-term effects of neoliberal ideology on the sector, charting the way that ongoing crises of/in higher education work to co-opt university workers and students into a position in which they are required to defend the idea of the university as a site of enlightenment. We then discuss the erosion of funding in the arts and argue that in concert with the diminished resourcing of the university, ad hoc social spaces within contemporary art have become temporary communities for study. We analyse a project of our own-Endless Study, Infinite Debt-which seeks to engage in the collective study of infrastructure, settlement, and racial capitalism. We consider how the university and art might be ambivalently engaged to practise forms of care and study against privatisation/professionalisation and towards solidarity.
This essay builds on various critiques of the relationship between the voice and autonomous indiv... more This essay builds on various critiques of the relationship between the voice and autonomous individual subjectivity, briefly tracking the specific history through which the voice transformed into an ideal object representing the liberal subject of post-Enlightenment thought. This paper asks: what are we to make of those enfleshed voices that do not conform to the ideal voice of the self-possessed liberal subject? What are we to make of those voices that refuse the imperative of improvement that underpins social and economic contractualism? How might we attend to the sonicity of those voices that refuse to individuate, possess, and accumulate? And what fugitive modes of speech might be transmitted by such unformed and unorganized voices? Against the idealized voice of liberalism, and the gendered and racialized exclusions that this voice implies, I propose a mode of fugitive listening that allows us to open our ears to the noisy voices and modes of speech that sound outside the locus of politics proper. Indebted to the Black radical tradition, fugitive listening attends to sonic practices that refuse the given grounds of representation. I argue that fugitive listening is a practice that can be situated in what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call 'the undercommons'. The essay concludes by turning to gossip, figuring this noisy modality of speech as central to undercommon spaces shaped by Black performance.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police has spark... more In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police has sparked protests and riots around the world. The policing of the pandemic reveals the racial biases inherent to law enforcement and state-led discipline, laying bare ongoing infrastructural inequalities that render racialized subjects more vulnerable to premature death at the hands of police and public health systems alike. With the video embedded in the article, we guide readers through thirty-nine seconds of rioting in Los Angeles on May 31, 2020, shot on a mobile phone and circulated virally on Twitter. The affected body of the witness indexes both the intensity of the event and the embodied experience of the witness, establishing a relation between the two. The experiential aesthetics of the video exceeds the content and this affectivity circulates with its mediation and movement through networked platforms. Such forms of affective witnessing allow for an attunement to political struggle that occurs through what Hortense Spillers would call the analytic of the flesh. Thinking at the intersection of Black studies, affect theory, and media studies, we argue that the flesh is an affective register crucial to the building of global anti-racist solidarities towards abolition.
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 2021
In this paper we take up the concept of the ‘chorus’ as explored by Saidiya Hartman in Wayward L... more In this paper we take up the concept of the ‘chorus’ as explored by Saidiya Hartman in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. In that book, Hartman imagines the chorus as a collective expression of resistance and survival – the sound of many voices speaking out and speaking up. We argue that the concept of the chorus can be understood in Marxist terms as an expression of surplus population, and as such, is always provoking crisis. We consider surplus popula- tions in relation to three historic moments of upheaval and resis- tance, and the representation of these events (or lack thereof): the riot of Black girls at the Bedford Hills Reformatory in 1919; cafeteria riots led by trans, queer, and gender non-conforming people in the 1950s and 1960s in California; and the 2004 Palm Island riot that irrupted in the wake of the death of Mulrunji Doomadgee. In each case, the riots (and their expression in the form of a chorus) responded directly to aggressive policing and the violence of the state. These riots are not merely about responding to the violence of policing but also about defending that irreducible and genera- tive excess that might variously be described as Blackness, queer- ness, and Indigeneity.
This paper considers the relationship between sound and the structural violence of whiteness in t... more This paper considers the relationship between sound and the structural violence of whiteness in the context of the Australian settler colony. It thinks with an archive of audio recordings made by the Manus Recording Project Collective, a group of men currently or formerly held in involuntary and indefinite detention after seeking asylum in Australia, and their collaborators in Melbourne. Tracking the demonisation of refugees in the media and party politics over the past two decades, I develop the notion of the white sonic field as a way of accounting for the way both sound and perception are racially saturated in the settler colony. The sonic field, which comprises both the sounds we hear and the forces that mediate our hearing, is crucial to the maintenance of whiteness in the settler state, structuring perception and naturalising settlement through the repetition of possessive speech acts and the selective silencing of non-white voices. Cutting through the white sonic field are recordings from the where are you today archive produced by the Manus Recording Project Collective. I argue that these recordings reclaim the right to representation, moving beyond both the erasure of refugees and spectacle of their suffering. These recordings compel us to listen beyond the border and beyond the white sonic field, asking us to consider how we might dismantle the carceral system of mandatory and indefinite detention.
A review of essay of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories o... more A review of essay of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
The Art of Laziness: Contemporary Art and Post-Work Politics, 2020
A critical examination of racist representations of Indigeneity in the settler colony of Australi... more A critical examination of racist representations of Indigeneity in the settler colony of Australia and the role such representations play in the legitimation of colonial violence. The chapter considers tactics of refusal employed by First Nations artists
A paper that examines the concept of gossip, considering it not only as a way of speaking but als... more A paper that examines the concept of gossip, considering it not only as a way of speaking but also as a way of composing and reading texts—broadly speaking, gossip as a textual modality. The paper begins by introducing gossip in critical terms and finishes by reading works by Clare Milledge, Vincent Namatjira and Vernon Ah Kee as gossip.
Permanent Recession: A Handbook on Art, Labour and Circumstance, 2019
An essay on colonial archives and the creation of counter-archives artwork of D Harding. Original... more An essay on colonial archives and the creation of counter-archives artwork of D Harding. Originally published in Runway. Republished in Permanent Recession: A Handbook on Art, Labour and Circumstance.
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