Predatory Value: Economies of Dispossession and Disturbed Relationalities

This essay introduces and theorizes the central concerns of this special issue, “Economies of Dispossession: Indigeneity, Race, Capitalism.” Financialization, debt, and the accelerated concentration of wealth today work through social relations already configured and disposed by imperial conquest and racial capitalism. In the Americas broadly and the United States specifically, colonization and transatlantic slavery set in motion the dynamics and differential racialized valuations that continue to underwrite particular forms of subjection, property, commerce, and territoriality. The conception of economies of dispossession introduced in this essay draws attention to the overriding importance of rationalities of abstraction and commensurability for racial capitalism. The essay problematizes the ways in which dispossession is conventionally treated as a self-evident and circumscribed practice of unjust taking and subtractive action. Instead, working across the lethal confluences of imperial conquest and racial capitalist predation, this essay critically situates the logic of propriation that organizes and underwrites predatory value in the historical present. Against the commensurabilities and rationalities of debt and finance capitalism, conditioned through the proprietary logics of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, the essay gestures toward alternative frameworks for building collective capacities for what the authors describe as a grounded relationality

Repetition, pattern and the domestic: notes on the relationship between pattern and home-making

Repetition constitutes the very essence of pattern. Repetition is also the basis of our most ordinary actions. Repetitive gestures are usually so integrated in our lives that we tend to take them for granted. It is only when repetition is excessive or absent that we become aware of its importance to us. Not least because of their everyday properties, pattern and repetition are also closely related to the domain of the domestic. On the one hand, patterned artifacts, such as wallpapers, rugs, latticed curtains, and other fabrics seem to operate naturally as signifiers of an idea of domesticity, denoting privacy, comfort and, eventually, also seclusion and confinement. On the other hand, the repetitive rituals of pattern fabrication bear strong resonance with the traditional routines of household maintenance—cleaning, sorting, laundering, and so on. Not only are both dependent on a logic of continuous reiteration, but they also tend to be considered equally mindless and prosaic, as their processes are often rated inferior in comparison to less repetitive forms of production. In “Repetition, Pattern, and the Domestic” I investigate the foundations and implications of the identification between pattern and the home, drawing on material from historical, mythological, and psychological sources. This investigation aims to show how the repetitive mechanisms of pattern-making integrate the very dynamics of inhabitation, being essentially entangled, if sometimes inconspicuously, with the practice of spatial design

A Flight to Domesticity? Making a Home in the Gentlemen’s Clubs of London, 1880–1914

In 1888 The Society Herald described the typical day of a young bachelor: “He breakfasts, lunches, dines, and sups at the club. He is always at billiards, which he doesn’t understand, he writes innumerable letters, shakes hands a dozen times a day, drinks coffee by the gallon, and has a nod for everybody. He lives, moves, and has his being within his club. As the clock strikes 1 a.m. his little body descends the stairs and goes out through the big front door like a ray of moonlight, and until the same morning at ten of the o’clock no human being has the slightest knowledge of his existence or his whereabouts.”1 For this man, as for hundreds of other upper-class men in London, clubland constituted an entire world.2 For thousands more, clubs formed the backdrop of their lives; in the middle of the city, clubs afforded private spaces dedicated to relaxation and camaraderie. Both married and single men regarded their club as the central part of their lvies, functioning as a surrogate home. According to contemporary ideals, the family was supposed to act as the space of refuge from the chaos of the hectic modern world, and yet in the late nineteenth century clubs were taking over this essential role. John Ruskin’s classic definition of the home centered on its role as a shelter from the physical and emotional toils of the world.3 John Tosh notes that in everyday life, the domestic ideal was so populat it addressed the needs of men who were suffering from the rapidly industrializing urban landscape.4 Family life and the home were perceived as integral to men’s identifies in the nineteenth century to a degree never before realized, as the home was both a man’s possession and where his emotional needs were satisfied.5 Yet this largely middle-class ideal was not without challenges. The homes of even the most respectable middle classes could never live up to the walled gardens of the poetic imagination. As Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall demonstrate, the separation of public and private spheres was an ideal that did not change the fact that the family and the home took on many public functions.6 The gentlemen’s clubs, seemingly in the heart of the public sphere, actually provided their members the friendly intimacy and privacy ideally located in the home

Chaucer's Jailer's Daughter

textWe know that Shakespeare read Chaucer, but we do not know exactly how he read Chaucer. Established models of source studies require solid "proof," but this paper proposes a more liquid conception of influence that permeates a work in unexpected ways. The Jailer's Daughter, the seemingly un-Chaucerian alteration to The Knight's Tale frame of the Shakespeare and Fletcher play, The Two Noble Kinsmen, acts as the case study of such permeation. Only a single line in the lengthy Knight's Tale offers a parallel figure for this character: the Knight narrates that Palamon escapes prison "By helpyng of a freend," and in the play the Jailer's Daughter frees Palamon from her father's prison. Because it does not supply dialogue, a name, or even a gender to the "freend," The Knight's Tale has long been presumed to offer Shakespeare and Fletcher little beyond this event to inspire the play's more substantive subplot. I argue that the Jailer's Daughter offers a surprising means of connection not only to The Knight's Tale, the obvious source text, but also to the other tales of the First Fragment of The Canterbury Tales, which "quite" the tale of courtly love that precedes them. In The Two Noble Kinsmen, she embodies what the Knight disallows in his narration of the tale, leaking madness and feminine desire into the play's foundation. This structure ultimately suggests how Shakespeare works characterologically, channeling the complexity of a source such as Chaucer fluidly through a unit of character.Englis

Century Farms Carry on Tradition

A collaborative research project explores the success of century farms

Faculty Books Now Available

A look at recently published books by Linfield faculty

Conflicts Within the Black Churches

This essay examines conflicts concerning sex, sexuality, and gender within Black churches. Black churches are American Protestant churches with a predominantly Black leadership and congregation. Often serving the oppressed and underprivileged, Black churches have a history not only of providing for the spiritual needs of Black Americans, but also of fighting for social justice. Increasingly, controversies have begun to emerge within these churches, about gender equality, HIV/AIDS and safer sex education, and, perhaps the most controversial, about homosexuality and same-sex marriage. This essay discusses how Black churches have responded to these issues and the impact that HIV/AIDS has had on this response. Additionally, examples of the role of women and sexual minorities in Black church denominations and congregations will be provided