Engaging (Past) Participants: The Case of radicalprintshops.org

Wikis have for some time been heralded for their democratic and participatory potential and there has been significant research into the use of wikis in a variety of contexts. Within academic research they tend to be used by closed groups to manage material rather than for research per se. This chapter describes an experiment and the challenges to do the latter through the instigation of the open access wiki radicalprintshops.org

Bye-bye Barack: dislocating afropolitanism, spectral marxism and dialectical disillusionment in two Obama-era novels

In contextually specific and formally distinctive ways, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers are fictional interrogations of Obama’s presidential pledge to resuscitate the American dream on the wake of the global financial crash. This paper explores how they supplement and challenge familiar tropes associated with African and American, rather than African-American, diaspora writing. Given broader debates within transnational literary studies about flows and exchanges (of people, finance, cultural production, dissemination, consumption et al.) linking the global South and North, I consider how these texts grapple with the complexities and complicities of contemporary neoliberalism through the lens of renascent African Marxisms. While my chosen writers could not be described as Marxist, I engage with more materially oriented scholarship, such as Krishnan’s Writing Spatiality in West Africa and Ngugi’s The Rise of the African Novel, to consider how Americanah and Behold the Dreamers circulate in a global literary marketplace where certain texts, not to mention authors, are seen as symptomatic of an African and/or Afropolitan and/or ‘Africapitalist’ renaissance. By grappling with Marxist-inflected scholarship, this paper interrogates the politics, as well as poetics, of the oft-conspicuous airbrushing of those socio-economic, specifically class concerns at the heart of these entangled debates

Learning Not to Labor

In autonomist history and theory, the refusal of work is frequently invoked but seldom expanded upon in a significant manner. From the celebration of laziness to mass industrial strikes, work refusal takes many forms. This essay develops an expanded autonomist conception of work refusal, understanding work refusal as a compositional practice and arguing for analyzing it through the forms of collectivity and social relations that it creates. Based on this analysis, a form of ?zerowork training,? or a pedagogy of learning not to labor, is proposed as a process through which antagonism and refusal can be further socialized. Learning not to labor sits at the junction of the refusal of work and the re-fusing of the social energies of such refusal back into supporting the continued affective existence and capacities of other forms of life and ways of being together, as practice and as a form of embodied critique