Tag: Arturo

Building off the analysis they set out in their articles this summer [1, 2, 3], Shemon and Arturo trace the mounting hostilities of our present moment back to the unfinished business of the first American Civil War and the counter-insurrection that crushed its emancipatory promise. Must the escalating violence all around us descend into a shooting war? To what extent does race continue to serve as a limit condition of our ability to imagine a free and dignified life in common in this country, beyond the dictates of the economy and the police? Must the liberation of a life in common proceed from a frontal clash, or does it look more like a decentralized processes of desertion and secession fragmenting the territory? Does revolution today look more like Reconstruction, the Free State of Jones, or neither? How does the new geography of conflict—no longer divisible into North and South, but traversing every city, every town—complicate our received image of civil war? If the rebellion this summer was a preamble to a new form of civil war, what are the vortices that allow its emancipatory .to deepen and expand, rather than trap itself in sacrificial black holes? While this essay attempts a first provisional sketch of the historical roots of our horizons, we hope it will serve as an invitation for others to throw out their wagers on the present.