Affirmative Politics Research Articles

Performing Black life: the FAMU Marching 100 and the Black aesthetic politics of disruption, presence and affirmation

Black thought has long emphasized the vital importance of aesthetic politics to Black activism and community life. Recent scholarship has emphasized the importance of analyzing the aesthetic geographies of festivals. In this paper, we extend the discussion of festival geographies through theoretical engagement with Black thought and empirical engagement with Black parades in the US South. Specifically, we use an examination of the aesthetic geographies of Florida A&M University’s Marching 100 to think through the relationships between form and improvisation, performance and belonging and affirmative aesthetic politics. Following Black scholars, we show that Black aesthetic geographies work to counter the normative containment and erasure of Black spatiality in a white supremacist society. We demonstrate that Black aesthetic practices act as a refusal of this containment and erasure, disrupting normative geographies of whiteness and asserting Black socio-spatial presence and relations of belonging that affirm Black life.

Towards a (Self-)Compassionate Music Education: Affirmative Politics, Self-Compassion, and Anti-Oppression

Towards a (Self-)Compassionate Music Education: Affirmative Politics, Self-Compassion, and Anti-Oppression

로힌턴 미스트리의 『그토록 먼 여행』에 나타난 긍정의 정치학

The purpose of this paper is to examine the affirmative aspects of negative parts of our life in the world that only emphasizes ‘progress and development’, in Such a Long Journey by Rohinton Mistry. In a novel set in the 1970s Indian society, one of the main reasons to pay attention to the politics of affirmation is to reflect on the Western modernity, which has been the biggest task of the Third World countries since the liberation of colonial rule. This study focuses on the inner journey of the protagonist and looks at how the internalized developmental historical view of the character is overcome. To this end, we will consider the characteristics of the narrative method of recalling past memories. In the novel set in 1971, the protagonist Gustad faces a number of challenges, both inside and outside, such as war, refugee influx, living environment, family and friends. This study analyzes the function of non-rational and non-scientific elements in the rational and science-oriented era by analyzing the structure of ‘emotions’ revealed (or cannot reveal) by the protagonist. The conclusion is that Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey is a journey away from social values and where the protagonist struggles to affirm his own affairs. Self affirmation is self liberation, which creates a flow that changes relationships. This study will be a meaningful journey in the ‘now, here,’ which seeks for ‘post-modernity,’ reflecting on Western/non-western distinctions.

Affective bodying of mathematics, children and difference: choreographing \u2018sad affects\u2019 as affirmative politics in early mathematics teacher education

This paper responds to the frequently occurring phenomena of ‘sad affects’ experienced by student teachers as they confront the logic of ‘proper mathematics’ with young children of differently abled bodies. The notion of ‘proper’ entails a normalizing fixity of ‘what counts’ as mathematics for certain children and fails to recognize mathematics as a sensual encounter amongst bodies. The study draws upon Spinoza’s notion of affect to consider the body’s capacity to act, and makes the case for choreographing with body-movement, rather than disclosing, the politics involved in becoming teachers. It discusses how affective bodying with mathematics, children and difference in the classroom practice can be not only deconstructed but also reconstructed in affirmative terms, choreographically, as feeling and thinking-in-movement in ways that trouble and perturb the prevailing sharing of the ‘sensible’ in early childhood mathematics and in teacher education.

On the Transformative Potential of Community Land Trusts in the United States

AbstractGrowing interest in non‐capitalist ownership models raises empirical questions about the political implications of such models. In this paper we ask: are non‐capitalist property ownership models inherently politically transformative? A study of community land trusts (CLTs) based in Minnesota illustrates that alternative property models do not necessarily produce transformative political outcomes. Interviews of those involved inCLTs revealed that they most often engage in affirmative politics, rather than challenging structural problems. Seeds of transformation were evident in theseCLTs as well, however, and we explore these moments through four lenses of transformation in order to see the potential building blocks toward other worlds. To this end, we highlight changes in participant subjectivities, collective relationship building, the cultivation of community control, and the subversion of power hierarchies. While these moments offer pathways toward greater transformation, this study reveals the necessity of intentionally transformative practice in alternative ownership models.

Toward a Politics of Immediation

A passage from Fred Moten haunts the writing of these words that seek to push a politics of identity toward a politics of immediation. In a parenthetical aside in a paper on the city and the commune, Fred Moten cautions us as regards the critique of identity politics. Too often, he writes, critiques of identity politics are waged against non-white, non-straight, non-male identity [...] while courteously leaving politics to its own uncriticized devices” (2016: 163). Through the figure of immediation, I ask: what happens when we do not insert a mediating gesture at the heart of experience? Is such a move capable of problematizing the figure of identity while still remaining sensitive to the fact for some the loss of a sense of identity may feel like the very same gesture as the colonial act of exclusion from the category of the human? In this double articulation of refusing mediation and introducing a time-form that challenges human-centred, colonial history, can we create an affirmative politics of emergent subjectivity that does not ignore that allegiances are necessary in the face of the systemic violence of oppression? The task, it seems to me, involves recasting allegiance such that it need no longer be subsumed to identity, and, by extension, to the individual. For the individual, that pet-figure of neoliberalism, is nothing more than the other side of the subject, which is the other side of the human. To focus on the individual in an exploration of modes of existence, to make the politics about the individual, is to reinstall a mediation that knows in advance how to recognize the human as orienter of experience. The problem of identity must instead be engaged from the perspective of Wynter’s “descriptive statement” of the human. This category of the human, as Wynter underscores, is concerned to perpetuate a genre of the human (2015: 9). What kinds of sociality cut across this genre?

The possibilities and limits to dialogue

In this article, we explore the nature, value, and challenges of dialogue both within and outside the academy. After considering the possibilities and limits to dialogue, we divide our analysis into three sections, first discussing dialogue as a form of embodied action, next examining dialogue as a means of enacting a critically affirmative politics, and finally exploring the challenges of engaging in dialogue as a way of practicing public geographies. In each case, we raise a number of questions concerning the potential of, and limitations to, dialogue in an age of increasing social tensions and political divides. We conclude by suggesting that although there are times when dialogical disengagement is warranted if the conditions of possibility for meaningful dialogue are unfulfilled, scholarly dialogue continues to play an important role in fostering spaces of mutual engagement in a polarized age.

Grasping the affirmative: Power and the process of becoming joyful academic subjects

We investigate becoming joyful subjects in academia among feminist geographers using the methodology of collective biography. Collective biography uses the researchers' own written memories about a set of experiences as texts for analysis. This paper brings together ideas about ontological positivity and power and applies them to the process of subjectification. We use the concepts potentia and potestas to explore force relations that generate particular subjects: here, joyful ones. We suggest that the generation of joyful subjects, even momentarily, helps to sustain the possibility of an affirmative politics. Joy, as an effect of the positivity of power, offers one pathway towards engaging varied feminist world-making projects within the academy, and beyond.

Ceylan's Winter Sleep: From Ambiguity to Nothingness

Nuri Bilge Ceylan is a puzzling filmmaker who started his career as a photographer and initially made films with a “photographic” spirit. But from his first films known as the Trilogy of Province to his award winning latest feature Winter Sleep, Ceylan has changed drastically. Once a modest artist refusing to give interviews, Ceylan has become a regular “red carpet” figure. So this essay will analyze Ceylan’s Winter Sleep from a critical theoretical perspective and try to underline the changes in his cinematography as well as philosophical orientations since his Trilogy of Province. The main points of argument will focus on his shift from an affirmative politics of “ambiguity” towards a dark postmodern “nothingness”.

Éticas y estéticas para una reconexión. Estudios de caso para una práctica de diseño ecológica

This work reflects on the founding capacity in the domains of design and locates in its presence one of the aspirations to improve the so-named ecological design. We will begin from proposals close to feminist theory as that of Haraway, Stengers and Barad, who alert us of the needing to relate more and better with other entities beyond the humans. Also, from Braidotti proposal on the need for ethics and affirmative politics. As an example, we will propose the rupture produced in the scientific culture with the first women primatologist appearance in the 1960s, where affection, care and empathy, burst into the scope of what is valuable and significant. The final question to test is the possibility of rethinking creativity in architecture from the warmer domains of being together. Finally, we will explore two recent case studies where the operativity of these theoretical contributions in architectural practices can be recognized.

MOVIMENTOS NEGROS E O DIREITO À EDUCAÇÃO: DAS LUTAS PELO ACESSO À IMPLEMENTAÇÃO DA LEI 10.639/2003 NO CONTEXTO ESCOLAR BRASILEIRO

This article was intended to analyze the right to education within the Brazilian Constitutions from an ethnic-racial perspective, highlighting the role of Black Activism charging the government, arrangements that would be able to combat racial inequalities present in the Brazilian society, mainly through the implementation of the Affirmative Actions Politics. It was discussed the way that the universalization of public education has included and/or excluded certain groups that constitute our brazilian society. It highlights the relevance of effective specific measures in order to ensure the access and/or the endurance of the black population in the education system, as well as debates about the black people’s position and the black culture within the school curriculum.

“You can only be happy if you’re thin!” Normalcy, happiness, and the lacking body

ABSTRACTWithin the expanding field of fat studies, we have come to understand different ways that fat bodies have been scrutinized for their “deviance” from the anticipated norms of society. The author interrogates the role racializing assemblages play in categorizing and disciplining bodies based on humanism and its fixed sizeist-normative temporality. With the supported idealized form, the human template as well as racialized and fat bodies are distinguished as lacking under the criteria of deficit. Subsequently, the promise of happiness in the context of Whiteness and thinness is set up as a form of normative time that must be followed to gain access to the privilege of being human. An autoethnographic methodology is used to situate the author’s own experience as a fat, racialized woman grounded in theory. In the latter portion of the paper the author discusses the affirmation of the body and its materiality within a new materialist framework. What is of utmost importance to consider in affirmative politics is that one’s race and fatness can be accentuated and accepted as forms of difference informing and intermingling with each other and our surroundings as they are brought to the forefront.

The affirmative politics of degrowth: Miguel Brieva’s graphic narrative Memorias de la Tierra

ABSTRACTThis work explores how Miguel Brieva’s 2012 graphic narrative Memorias de la Tierra constructs social horizons for change and action - what Rosi Braidotti calls “affirmative politics” - based on a systemic critique of consumer culture and capitalist ideology. Brieva’s social critique and advocacy for change in Memorias dialogue with central tenets of Southern European socio-ecological movements - particularly degrowth - and Spanish grassroots democracy movements - including 15-M and the platform ¡Democracia Real Ya! - that undermine key assumptions of capitalist economics and neoliberal politics. I argue that the complexity of Memorias' graphic form allows Brieva to more effectively participate in the construction of an affirmative politics that reflects contemporary redefinitions of community, activism and knowledge production. Brieva offers his reader complex information in a palatable, visual manner, allowing for the nondogmatic communication of activist projects. While degrowth highlights consumer apathy as a major barrier to effective change, I examine how Memorias’ graphic form works to engage readers, reminding them of their autonomy and capacity for action. Memorias’ critique and affirmative politics are explored in the context of the charged and dynamic social debate that gained momentum after the 2008 Spanish economic crisis.

Reinventing Pluralism: Consensus, Hegemony, and the Politics of Affirmation

As inequalities in the United States have intensified in recent decades, Washington, DC’s advocacy system has thrived. Why has this proliferation of interest groups failed to deliver more substantive equality? The dominant response to this question typically cites the advocacy realm’s “upper-class accent,” portraying interest group representation as imbalanced and unresponsive to a broad range of voices. Yet this prevailing account—which I term “post- pluralist”—does not sufficiently explore the inegalitarian ways that neoliberalism shapes contemporary political advocacy. To this end, this article builds upon post-pluralist and post-Marxist insights to outline the advocacy system’s “politics of affirmation.” Using recent antigay legislation to explore this concept, I argue that today’s political advocacy circumscribes, rather than enlivens, prevailing standards of democratic participation by mobilizing hegemonic, neoliberal expressions of democratic citizenship. The article concludes by outlining how groups might pursue a transformative politics in order to destabilize neoliberalism’s hegemony.

Fabulation as a pedagogical possibility: working towards a politics of affirmation

The wave of student-led protests that have taken place across the South African higher education landscape over the last two years provides us, as teacher educators, with the opportune time to reflect on how our pedagogical practices relate to larger societal transformative imperatives. We engage with the relationship between pedagogical practices and social transformation by attending to questions concerning identity, intersubjectivity, and group relations. We argue that conventional pedagogical practices that work towards social justice are entangled with and regulated by identity politics, and that such a position equates these pedagogical practices with a politics of negation and ressentiment. By drawing on Deleuze’s interpretation of the concept of fabulation and Deleuze and Guattari’s argument that desire is a positive social force that enables experimentation to occur, we re-imagine the idea of a pedagogy as a politics of affirmation. Such politics, we argue, makes possible the constitution of new social collectivities that are able to escape the gravitational pull of identity politics and ressentiment. We posit that, in the midst of student protests, this is an important first step in generating the conditions to experiment with the creation of a different, more socially just future.

Affective politics in gendered organizations: Affirmative notes on becoming-woman

Current approaches to the study of affective relations are over-determined in a way that ignores their radicality, yet abstracted to such an extent that the corporeality and differentially lived experience of power and resistance is neglected. To radicalize the potential of everyday affects, this article calls for an intensification of corporeality in affect research. We do this by exploring the affective trajectory of ‘becoming-woman’ introduced by Deleuze and Guattari. Becoming-woman is a process of gendered deterritorialization and a specific variation on becoming-minoritarian. Rather than a reference to empirical women, becoming-woman is a necessary force of critique against the phallogocentric powers that shape and constrain working lives in gendered organizations. While extant research on gendered organizations tends to focus on the overwhelming power of oppressive gender structures, engaging with becoming-woman releases affective flows and possibilities that contest and transgress the increasingly subtle and confusing ways in which gendered organization affects people at work. Through becoming-woman, an affective and affirmative politics capable of resisting the effects of gendered organization becomes possible. This serves to further challenge gendered oppression in organizations and to affirm a life beyond the harsh limits that gender can impose.

On Reconciling Biopolitics and Critical Theory

This article examines attempts to reconcile biopolitics and Critical Theory, by drawing on Miguel Vatter’s The Republic of the Living (2014). Vatter contends that modern neoliberal government has become biopolitical by incorporating biological life into the calculations of political rationality. To counteract its “normalising” impacts, he recommends an “affirmative politics” of the living, one that escapes the techniques envisaged to administer and govern life. Only a dual approach, he suggests, that fuses both democratic and critical political and economic arguments, can contest neoliberalism. Vatter asserts that the basis of such a critique was first established by the Critical Theory tradition. However, for a biopolitical critique to become effective today, it is crucial to enhance the descriptive and normative understanding of the concept of Zoë or species life within the critical theoretical discourse. This shift in emphasis, however, raises several interpretative tensions with the fundamental perspectives and values of Critical Theory that are not fully acknowledged in Vatter’s proposed reconciliation of biopolitics and Critical Theory.

Becoming-Queer-Arab-Activist: The Case of Meem

Drawing on the study-case of the Meem queer activist community in Beirut, I analyze the movements of de-territorialization and re-territorialization in the micropolitical flow of their located struggle. I intervene with the Deleuzian notions of becoming nomadic and affirmative politics of difference, the politics of location in the work of Rosi Braidotti, and Audre Lorde’s notion of the erotic to think the becoming-queer-Arab-activist and map the complex processes of non-linear and differential becomings. My purpose is to conceptualize the non-linearity and the movement of the “different difference” of queer Arabness, which blurs the dialectical and identitarian binary of sexuality reproduced by the exotic Gay International and the exclusively discursive frameworks. I use these concepts to map the fluxes and the affirmative affectivities of desire in the Arab queer activism illustrated by Meem’s non-identitarian approach.

Making Different Differences: Representation and Rights in Sexuality Activism

This paper argues that current iterations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) rights are limited by an overreliance on particular representations of sexuality, in which homosexuality is defined negatively through a binary of homosexual/heterosexual. The limits of these representations are explored in order to unpick the possibility of engaging in a form of sexuality politics that is grounded in difference rather than in sameness or opposition. The paper seeks to respond to Braidotti’s call for an “affirmative politics” that is open to forms of creative, future-oriented action and that might serve to answer some of the more common criticisms of current LGBTI rights activism.

Fourth Person. From the Impersonal to the Unavailable

In this paper I will try to analyze the very movement of Esposito’s thought towards positive, affirmative politics of life based on a positive, affirmative philosophy of life. From my point of view, this philosophical and political passage is extremely difficult if not dangerous. In order to illustrate both the dangers and positive virtualities of Esposito’s thought I will focus on three conceptual pairs: subject/life, communitas/immunitas, and impersonal/unavailable. The first two pairs are taken from Esposito’s works, the last one is mine and hints at further theoretical developments.