Pirate capitalism, or the primitive accumulation of capital itself

© The Author(s) 2018. Pirates are often described as existing on the margins of the world economy, emerging from the outskirts to disrupt otherwise free capitalist markets. With this narrative in mind, it is not surprising that the pirate remains a marginal figure within both the fictional stories and historical accounts of the emergence of capitalism. This article, however, asks: What do we learn about the capitalist world economy if we understand the pirate not as an outlaw but as a fellow capitalist? Weaving together stories of the golden age of piracy in the Atlantic world with contemporary piracy in the Gulf of Aden, I argue that pirate capitalism helps us to understand the capitalist world economy, not only demonstrating the violence and dispossession at the centre of capitalist accumulation but also making visible the fluid relationship between capital, sovereignty, violence, and freedom

Sensationalized Surveillance: Campus Reform and the Targeted Harassment of Faculty [post-print]

Campus Reform is a right-wing website that hires students to write articles accusing universities and faculty members of “liberal bias.” These pieces circulate widely within the right-wing media ecosystem, where they can inspire self-deputized online vigilantes to harass faculty members and college administrators to sanction their faculty members. We argue that Campus Reform is part of a well-funded and well-organized panoptic network that engages in the sensationalized surveillance of faculty. This paper first develops our concept of sensationalized surveillance. We then offer a comprehensive institutional history of Campus Reform – demonstrating that it originates with, and continues to operate as, a conservative political technology. We then explore the details of how this surveillance apparatus functions and conclude by examining the disciplining effects Campus Reform has on faculty

Reflections on Universities, Politics, and the Capitalist State: An Interdisciplinary and Intergenerational Discussion with Clyde W. Barrow

Since its publication in 1990, Clyde W. Barrow’s book, Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894-1928, has been a touchstone text for generations of scholars studying higher education. This conversation between Barrow, Heather Steffen, and Isaac Kamola examines the book’s legacy in order to explore how the interdisciplinary study of higher education has changed over the past three decades. In doing so, they examine the space and place of academic knowledge and academic labor, offering an interdisciplinary discussion of critical praxis within the university

Politics of African Anticolonial Archive

African political writing of the mid-20th century seeks to critically engage with questions of identity, history, and the state for the purpose of national and human liberation. This volume collects an array of essays that reflect on anticolonialism in Africa, broadly defined. Each contribution connects the historical period with the anticolonial present through a critical examination of what constitutes the anticolonial archive. The volume considers archive in a Derridean sense, as always in the process of being constructed such that the assessment of the African anticolonial archive is one that involves a contemporary process of curating. The essays in this volume, as well as the volume itself, enact different ways of curating material from this period.The project reflects an approach to documents, arguments, and materials that can be considered “international relations” and “world politics,” but in ways that that intentionally leaves them unhinged from these disciplinary meanings. While we examine many of the same questions that have been asked within area studies, African studies, and International Relations, we do so through an alternative archive. In doing so, we challenge the assumption that Africa is solely the domain of policy makers and area studies, and African peoples as the objects of dataPreface, Pal Aluwalia / 1. Introduction: Politics of African Anticolonial Archive, Isaac A. Kamola and Shiera S. el-Malik / 2. Archiving the Universal: Commonwealth, Truth and Pluralism in International Law, Siba Grovogui / 3. Curating and Politics: Searching for Coherency in Archives, Shiera S. el-Malik / 4. Comradeship, Committed and Conscious: The Anticolonial Archive Speaks to Our Times, Branwen Gruffydd Jones / 5. Realism Without Abstraction: Amílcar Cabral and a Politics of the World, Isaac Kamola / 6. Inviting Marianne to Dance: Congolese Rumba Lingala as an Archive Against Monument, Míde Ní Shúilleabháin / 7. Recollections of Past Events of British Colonial Rule in Northern Ghana, 1900-1956, Christopher Azaare Anabila / 8. The Skin and the Stool: Re-Crafting Histories of Belonging in Northern Ghana, Anatoli Ignatov / 9. “… But for God\u27s Sake, Let’s Decolonize!”: Self-Determination and Sovereignty and/as the Limits of Anticolonial Archive, Timothy Vasko /10. The Hip-Hop DJ as Black Archaeologist: Madlib’s Beat Konducta in Africa and the Politics of Memory, Seth M. Markle / 11. Archiving Thomas Sankara’s Presence: Metamorphoses of Memory and Revolution in Burkina Faso, Allen Stack / Afterword: Archives, Life, and Counter- Archives, Sam Opondo