So exciting!!
Social and political philosophy, feminist philosophy, almost done with a book on the philosophy of Audre Lorde Postdoc at Uni Hamburg Photo by Frank Ward, 1999 https://www.calebward.xyz/
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So exciting!!
Ugh, this sounds harrowing on both the level of large and small things
Oh now I see that the post is probably about how ppl talk about food. Yawn.
Maybe it’s just that I’ve been off of here for a few days, but I’m pretty sure this person is making up someone to get mad at
I’m off to the Lesbian Herstory Archive today to dive into Lorde’s poetry teaching binder and look at some of her early drafts. Looking forward to feeling that archive magic ✨ I’ll try to share what I find!
Really magical time yesterday at CUNY talking about Lorde and feelings and the need for a whole new form of power to turn this ship around. Recording will be posted at some point
It was magic! I thought of you speaking at the same moment while I presented! Your name was in the air (everyone loved the audio version of your book)
So nice seeing you two making this community work for each other!
I love this!! Thanks for being there!
I know there’s a lot of stuff we need to be talking about right now in the news and our lives, but please don’t forget to read poetry. I think it’s vitally important for imagining a beyond and working to get there
I arrived in NYC to give a talk and connect with some folks yesterday, and my first stop was a budget used book store, where I scooped up this Toi Derricotte book off the shelf for $5, only to find that is signed by the poet!
Ugh. All the more reason to read the other mag named The Philosopher, which is edited by lovely people and publishes excellent stuff: www.thephilosopher1923.org
Holy shit gotta hear this. I was on a bus in Ecuador in 2006 and whatever bootleg CD the driver had in played some devastating reggaeton with live instruments, and I’ve been looking for that feeling ever since
That’s not the leftist assessment. That’s very much the mainstream centrist view
I’ve had this experience on my latest stay back in the US. People ask how the US is seen in Germany (where I live) and the answer is very much Erdogan/Orban. everyone is puzzled why Americans are letting it happen after all the talk about democracy over the years
What a great lineup! Interested to read the piece on Dunayevskaya... she was a major influence on both Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde in the 1980s
Having fun planning this. I’m trying to work in some audio recordings of Lorde’s original speech. Hope some of you can join!
patience, caterpillar! The year is yet young
Filing this away for my future project on "Middle-aged White Guy Epistemology"
This from Jean-Luc Nancy. More like the birth of cringe, amirite
Ah yes, the post-Heideggerian middle-aged male drive to philosophize about breasts.
Certainly is the case with environmental law... not for spending half one's time though. More like half the people working in the field are working for industry on compliance (i.e., how to argue that industry is complying). My understanding is that there's a light and dark side in every area
Can’t wait! What’s the writing timeline on that project?
Also, it seems relevant for my work on how moral dissent can feed political agency 🌱
Hell yes! the title sounds fascinating!
I've been appreciating this too while researching the Lorde book and reading a history of Maria Stewart on the side. The interviews with Combahee folks (e.g., for Kimberly Springer's 2005 book) are so amazing, to see how folks mobilized in response to the Roxbury murders and other events
Read local reporting about what is happening locally. Stop reading the legacy media if it is only interested in building grand narratives.
Beins's book says it was 15k in 1977
I'll be at the LHA next week by the way to return to some Lorde files there—a binder of poetry she taught, as well as some of the early drafts of Zami. Thanks for all your work there!
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Ooh thanks 🫶
Yesterday I took a walk with Jan Freeman, who basically single-handedly willed Muriel Rukeyser’s classic work back into print in the 90s. We talked about Audre Lorde and poetry exercises and lesbian feminist gossip from the 70s. Please enjoy her fabulous poem “The Odyssey of Yes and No”:
anyone know the readership size of off our backs in the late 1970s? maybe @rachelcorbman.bsky.social?
*a freely genuflecting press
spot on
Don’t coward yourself out of this possibility
Also, it’s satire but White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty
Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler!
m.youtube.com/watch?v=jsZX...
Oh I love the new cover!! One of my absolute favorite pics 🌻
"This chapter's explanation of Lorde’s theory of 'personal power' should become required reading for all scholars of Lorde." 💫
So true!
"He has canvased a stunning array of sources—published essays, published poetry, interviews, archives, recordings—and he has brought tremendous interpretive generosity and philosophical acuity to bear on them." 🥰🥰🥰
Friends, is it a good sign when the first peer reviewer feedback on your manuscript comes back and opens with "This is a brilliant monograph on the social and political philosophy of Audre Lorde." .... I'm freaking glowing over here ☺️☺️☺️
The thing is, there IS an option for whole journals to go open access, just not individual articles (see below). We just need to crank up the pressure. Every time I get asked to contribute to a PDCnet journal, I tell the editors I can't do it unless PDC offers this
Basically he was using RUBS to make us pay for water used in “vacant” apartments that were actually illegally rented to day laborers in his buddy’s construction firm. Fight any system that depends on the good will of those with power over you
With the help of the tenants union here, I sued my Berlin landlord over ratio utility billing, and we fucking WON. So, kids, remember: unionize and fight to win.
Congrats! Looks interesting. This journal is so maddening because they publish very good stuff and then it is so hard to access... thanks for posting the pdf
It's also a subway station right in the center of the city, very high visibility to tourists and locals alike. It's a huge win for memory culture in a country that still strongly resists facing its colonial history in Africa
Not for good... just for Schulferien!
This is very cool! After 30 years trying to change the name of "Moors Street" in Berlin, they've renamed it after Anton Wilhelm Amo, the Akan philosopher from present-day Ghana who became a significant Enlightenment philosopher in Germany in the first half of the 1700s.
Another clear sign of being in the US: the 4yo wakes up and walks into the bathroom and the first thing he says to me is “In baseball, what happens when two runners are on first base?”
Obv The Tab isn't a high quality news outlet, but still dismaying to see the sexist framing on that article, with pics of college girls taking selfies as if their presence will mark the end of quality education
Congrats! This looks fascinating
Hell yeah, I used to go to Ozomatli shows in high school!
Case study number 4357 in support of my thesis that consent is not the foundation of moral responsibility in intimacy
For most of us, it's hard to imagine what that would even look like. But Lorde gives a blueprint: it's about feeling deeply the things we believe and do, and scrutinizing everything in our lives
Audre Lorde's public life as poet-educator began in 1968, at 34yo. She spent ~4yrs getting priorities straight about what that demanded—divorce, a lesbian home for her small children, etc.—and then she ran the table for 20 years. Can I spend my next 20 yrs unflinchingly on what I believe?
That's exciting! You gotta get that title under control tho lol
The funniest part about being back in western Massachusetts where I grew up is that everyone I see I think "Oh, I think I know them? No, don't think so." And then I hear that they're speaking English and I'm like "Oh, I probably do know them!" Then I realize I'm not in Germany any more. 🤦
Hey, come talk with me about social change and complicity in this event about Audre Lorde's famous statement about "the master's tools"! The talk is on Zoom and in NYC on Tues Aug. 26 at 6pm Eastern (sorry for the awkward start time for my ppl outside the western hemisphere)
Yes, your weekly reminder that cosplaying fascism is fascism. The performance of authority is fascism, because the whole fetish of fascism is how that performance makes the authority real.
this is such a great idea
Slightly diminish a band: Femi and the Minor Premise
we know, we know, #notallaristotelians
To be clear, this is no shade at anarchists! It’s shade at left orgs in general for not doing more to activate people’s energy, even when we’re trying to get on board to make stuff happen
Like, the fascists are out there having BBQs and this is what we have?
Meanwhile
A parable: my friend tried to join an anarchist political collective in Berlin and they responded that they aren’t open to new members because they are internally working out what their process should be. Then they attached an 80-page document and asked for his feedback.
🙏
Grad school is about learning useful methods and ways of thinking, not primarily about gaining a position within a hierarchy of prestige. But that’s not the advice that many prospective grad students receive!
The loss of these kinds of lineages of philosophical style or approach are a big drawback from thinking about grad programs in terms of rankings only
I wasn’t sure what I wanted from grad school, but I knew I wanted to join this tradition of creative feminist-informed philosophers. Tina was then already on her way out of DePaul, but this is why I ended up at Stony Brook: because she, Bonnie Mann, Noelle McAfee, Ann Cahill, etc had all gone there
Ooh looking forward to reading this on how epistemic oppression can undermine our ability to use concepts, even when we have them 👀 Congrats @margotw.bsky.social! link.springer.com/article/10.1...
One of my favorite jokes: A male feminist walks into a bar. Because it was set very very low.
Oh, no doubt. As a friend wrote recently, if a statement’s primary purpose is to cover your ass, that’s not accountability, that’s pants
Ahmed’s complaint yielded some results bsky.app/profile/boel...
One day everyone will have always been against this
Uh oh, Sigrid out here showing how the AI industry's modus ponens is actually the PhD industry's modus tollens. Bad news for all of us.
Lol they just went out and made the comparison
This work is super relevant for my own research toward a non-ideal theory of political agency. It is truly impossible to account for oppression in our philosophizing without drawing on qualitative empirical research like this
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I’ve been following this project for quite some time, and I’m more and more convinced that phil of race cannot be done well without serious comparative and historical work. Comparative work like this refracts many of the old debates into far more interesting questions
Hey aesthetics friends, what is your favorite recent stuff on the philosophy of music? I'm rebooting a class that was taught at GU for a long time, and I want to bring in a bunch of cool new stuff!
In my experience their forum is an active and useful place to find out about this stuff
Can you say more about what fits this description?
sorry for the typo...the friend was Sybil Landau, who became a lawyer and stayed involved in LGBT rights movements. She also worked to support "rape shield" laws in the 1970s to protect victims of sexual assault from being interrogated about their sexual backgrounds
I think it's hard for readers today to fathom what it meant for these women-loving women to find each other in the 1950s and share their struggles and make sense of their worlds. It was powerful and life-saving for so many...
Sending out the bat signal for fellow huge Audre Lorde nerds, because you can track Lorde's relationship to her Hunter College classmate Sybil Landeau through the inscriptions on the books Lorde gave her, which are for sale here with pics. www.jamescumminsbookseller.com/advSearchRes...
I recently got a request to referee an article for a top-three journal that I strongly suspect would never publish my own work, and I was thinking, “they value me only far enough to think I’d give profound feedback”
I think what’s going on here is that the TikTok critic who originally went viral talking about the ad called it “Nazi stuff”, and now that statement is being used to dismiss other criticism of the ad. It’s a familiar strategy of collapsing all criticism into its least plausible version
Look at LSE philosophy department both-sidesing the issue. Don’t pretend these two new hires won’t be forced to fight hand-to-hand in the department kitchen while tenured faculty throw crudite toothpicks at them
Local body of water, Sunday edition. I grew up just up the hill from this waterfall. I wonder how many thousands of years it’s been running
