Spaces of Punitive Violence

Prisons of Poverty by Loïc Wacquant, expanded edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Pp. 232. $60.00 cloth,$20.00 paper

The Logic of Capital and the Possibility of Resistance in Chris Abani’s \u3cem\u3eGraceLand\u3c/em\u3e

This paper argues that Chris Abani’s GraceLand, in the structuring both of the novel’s diegetic and non-diegetic materials and of the presence of labor in the narrative, offers a model of how particularity can effect resistance to capital through iterative survival. The argument begins with a close explication of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s deconstructive reading of Capital, demonstrating how the phenomenon of capital operates and proliferates through a logical structure that simultaneously necessitates and must eradicate the particular labors and histories that ‘precede’ any given instance of capital. With this theoretical framework in hand, the argument looks to James. M. Hodapp, whose analysis of the role of the kola nut in Abani’s novel as a signifier of precolonial West-African culture that continues to survive and signify in the non-diegetic sections of a book about postcolonial Nigeria serves as a way into reading the interplay of GraceLand’s non-diegetic and diegetic materials as the iterative alternation of capital’s simultaneous need to sustain and to destroy the particular histories which “precede” it, concluding that it is actually the repetition of the particular in the logic of capital that performs a kind of resistance and holds open the possibility of a future where the particular outlasts capital. Then, the argument responds to the common refrain amonst Hodapp and other critics that GraceLand’s narrative demonstrates only the degenerative, destructive drive and consequences of postcolonial capital, suggesting that Elvis Oke’s iterative labors as a dancer and Elvis Presley impersonator actually repeat his experiences of precolonial Igbo culture, which for him are bound up with the feminine and the precolonial, and, moreover, that Elvis’s persistent return to these labors despite repeatedly getting caught up in the dehumanizing labors imposed upon him by capital again point to the possibility of resistance to capital through the iterative survival of its antecedents

Remembering the Movement & Reminiscing on Achievements: An Interview with Professor Emeritus Raphael Cassimere, Jr.

Raphael Cassimere, Jr. (1942-) is a nationally recognized champion of social justice and civil rights veteran. He received his B.A.(1966) and M.A. (1968) degrees in History from LSUNO (now the University of New Orleans (UNO)). In 1971, he received a PhD in History from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He also became the first African American professor of UNO shortly after obtaining his PhD. In 2015, the institution established The Ralph Cassimere, Jr. Professorship in African American History. His rise to prominence began as an undergraduate student during the heyday of the civil rights movement. In 1960, he became president of the NAACP’s Youth Council. Since then, he has a held multiple local, regional, and national offices within the NAACP. Cassimere maintained his commitment to human and civil rights while teaching at UNO. He is a recipient of the ACLU’s Benjamin E. Smith Civil Liberties Award, the Louisiana NAACP’s Lifetime Presidential Award, U.S. State Department’s Outstanding Citizen Diplomacy Award and many of other accolades. In the following interview, Cassimere reflects on his early days in the civil rights movement