Capital Violence Research Articles

Embodying sound: body, territory, and community in the music of Mare Advertencia and Cynthia Montaño

ABSTRACT Rap and urban music have become increasingly relevant in the study of alternative practices of art, activism, and resistance in Latin America. This article examines how Mare Advertencia Lirika (Zapotec) and Cynthia Montaño (Afro-Colombian) use rap to build community and women’s agency through staging Indigenous and Afro ancestral knowledge in Oaxaca, Mexico, and Cali, Colombia, respectively. Grounded on an analysis of their albums and the conduct of ethnographic work in Oaxaca and Cali, I contend that these artists’ rap art embodies alternative forms of Indigenous, Black, and grassroots expressions from a feminist community perspective. By embedding their work on ancestral knowledge, community practices, and an interwoven sense of cuerpo-territorio, both at the sound and lyrical levels, these artists challenge patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist violence. This study aims to understand better the intersections between music, women of color’s agency, and social movements in local/global scenarios.

Resisting an unfolding genocide: reflections from radical struggles in the Global South

ABSTRACT This essay theorizes radical struggles at the world’s end, emergent from registers of organizing against colonial–imperial–capitalist violence in the Global South. Working through the ongoing genocidal violence carried out by Israel in Gaza, I explore the role of voice infrastructures in the Global South as the spaces where Global South theories are imagined, tested, and continually transformed. The tenets of the culture-centered approach (CCA), reflected in the everyday organizing work of the Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE), guide the conceptualization of the relationship between theorizing and struggle as embodied practice. For radical organizing to materialize at the world’s end, I argue the urgency of reorganizing the relationship between struggles and theorizing, cultivating a rhetoric and politics of suspicion, enacting sovereignty, forging connections, and sustaining a politics of preparation.

Human Right Violation Through State Terrorism in Indonesia

Abstract Indonesia is essentially pluralistic and multicultural. As a diverse country, Indonesia has the largest number of Muslim adherents in the world. The country commits itself on religious tolerance, democratic transformation, and the promotion of human rights. However, many Indonesians face religious discrimination. Laws, policies, and practices contrary to international human rights continue, and the State has been failing to protect its citizens from religious intolerance and violence. Concentration of power, wealth in the hand of oligarchy has caused state terrorism and capital violence. People’s initiatives to solve their own daily lives can be easily crushed. This paper chooses the case of Gafatar to show how state apparatus executed Three Ministerial Decrees as the legal justification of violence to its citizens, besides The Indonesian Council of Religious Scholars banned the Millah Abraham’s teaching, and until today, The Government has not revised it. Indonesia’s commitment to human dignity and harmony is questioned.

Capital violence and ethical absence in "Snow Crash"

Capital violence and ethical absence in "Snow Crash"

“A Slave Obeys”: Capital Violence and Illusory Agency in BioShock

The video game BioShock, developed by 2K Boston, depicts a world in which a laissez-faire capitalist named Andrew Ryan creates an underwater utopia called Rapture that is devoid of institutionalized oversight and entitles all of its citizens to their own production. Despite this exceptional aspiration, the game opens to a metropolis in disrepair; it showcases the broken endgame of the objectivist paradise it critiques (Yeates, 2015). Kevin Roozen suggests, in his paper “Writing is Linked to Identity,” that finding ways to engage students in a way that promotes selfhood is the key to engaging them as a community (2016). The brand of selfhood with which modern students in western capitalistic societies are familiar is often leveraged via excessive competition, and this suggests BioShock has unique insight to offer as a pedagogical locus (Kasser and Lin, 2016). Analyzing the inter-class competition within Rapture that caused the state of dissonance between its utopian ideals and dystopian practice leads to insight into the game’s take on Randian Objectivism and class inequality, an especially salient and relevant context to consider within the context of western economies replete with increasing levels of economic disparity and unrest (“Politics of Poverty”, 2010). In this essay, I approach BioShock with a Marxist perspective, aiming to showcase the game’s depictions of the social consequences for Rapture’s proletariat and bourgeoisie as meaningful insight into real-world class warfare. An important distinction I propose the game makes is in its depictions of agency, violence, and capitalism as intrinsically interconnected—they cannot be separated and are dependent on one another, because the sociological ecosystem established by the game’s narrative insists that each element is required; in so doing, my contention is that the game should be considered not only as a pop culture artifact, but as a legitimate piece of academic criticism in the vein of Marx’s Manifesto. I conclude that, in the game’s philosophical space, to be a successful capitalist, one requires agency without restriction, and the only way to exact that agency is through violence. Through its articulation of these concepts, BioShock functions as a useful vehicle in the search for accessible introductions to various economic, philosophical, and epistemological lessons.

Disturbing a Discipline: Towards Pluriversal Peace and Conflict Studies

ABSTRACT This article examines the implications of race critical and decolonial theories for peace and conflict studies. It critiques dominant epistemological frames in the field that overlook coloniality and racial capitalist violence while emphasizing human rights and universalism. The detachment of human rights from racial history is explored to reveal the coloniality of peace. The concept of ‘disturbing the disciplinary peace' is introduced, drawing on Sara Ahmed's figure of the ‘feminist killjoy’, to disrupt Western liberal peace through racial justice movements. Insights from decolonial thinkers and Indigenous resistance in Aotearoa are explored, challenging liberal human rights and offering prospects for pluriversal peace.

“It’s Like a Fairytale, Really”: Capitalist Fantasy, Postplanetary Rhetoric, and the New Space Race

ABSTRACT Recently, a private space race has emerged, helmed by some of the world’s wealthiest figures. These space entrepreneurs, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk most prominently, have framed the new space race as preparation for the permanent emancipation of humans from Earth. Brad Tabas terms this project the “post-planetary.” In this essay, I analyze postplanetary rhetoric through Todd McGowan’s theorization of fantasy, arguing that the discourse gains assent through operationalizing fantasies of abundance and relegating Earth to a lost cause. In charting the structure of this discourse, I seek to promote further disciplinary attention to fantasy for its capacity to illuminate how contemporary discourses of entrepreneurship and innovation perpetuate capitalism’s hegemony by cultivating consumers’ desires for plenty. I also seek to showcase how a rhetorical approach to fantasy both attends to capitalism’s abortive repression of its contradictions and reveals how the repressed Real of capitalist violence haunts the entrepreneurial scene.

Ontology as ideology: A critique of Butler's theory of precariousness

Ontology as ideology: A critique of Butler's theory of precariousness

Indigenous Erasure and Resistance in the Caribbean

Indigeneity has, for the most part, been absent in literature on the Caribbean, even in de-colonial writing. Writing on the Caribbean has often portrayed Indigenous people as extinct and thus as irrelevant to contemporary life in the Caribbean. Yet Indigenous peoples have played and continue to play a central role in Caribbean politics.
 This essay discusses how and why Indigenous people have been erased from discourse on the contemporary Caribbean. I argue that Indigenous erasure is a longstanding colonial tactic that is still used to justify the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Drawing on the case of the Maya peoples’ struggle for land in Belize, I describe some of the ways that Indigenous people continue to resist colonial and capitalist violence. Having identified and historicized the myth of Indigenous erasure in the Caribbean, I begin to sketch possibilities for shifting the discourse on the Caribbean such that it highlights rather than ignores the historical and ongoing contributions of Indigenous communities to the Caribbean. I suggest that diaspora and entanglement are two concepts that may be helpful for clarifying the Caribbean’s complex colonial histories in a way that underscores the importance of Indigenous peoples to the Caribbean.

The creation of capitalist time: Rethinking primitive accumulation through conservation

Scholars have revived the concept of primitive accumulation to describe how explicit violence is an ongoing and structural, rather than simply historical, tool for capitalist domination. However, the relationship between the logic of capitalism and history of capitalism remains obscured. Capitalism is politically enforced and hegemonic, but ongoing instances of capitalist violence repeatedly appear as though they were breaking new ground or finding new frontiers for capitalist growth. In this paper, I offer a novel framework for understanding how primitive accumulation not only creates a capitalist material order but also a temporal order that motivates and reproduces capitalist violence. Focusing on Maasai conflicts over conservation lands in Kenya and Tanzania, I describe how primitive accumulation imposes the historical narratives that naturalize capitalism, ecological rhythms that suppress competing lifeways, and identity categories that marginalize dispossessed populations by characterizing them as primitive. This account advances key debates about settler-colonialism, racial capitalism, and potential resistance by clarifying how disproportionate harm against particular populations is justified, how those justifications reproduce and naturalize capitalist domination, and how temporality represents not only a site of domination but also political struggle.

Introduction: Black Laughs Matter

Introduction: Black Laughs Matter

Wounded relational worlds

In this article we engage with four experimental ethnographies (Blaser, 2010; Lyons, 2020; Miller, 2019; and Gordillo 2014) that build on multispecies approaches for the analysis of what we call ‘wounded relational worlds’ in Latin America. These are worlds in which human and more-than-human relations have been significantly reshaped, broken, or disrupted by colonization and capitalist extractivism(s). Despite this, wounded relational worlds have the capacity to emerge from the ashes, rebuild on rubble, create new knowledge from destruction and use the remnants of capitalist violence as compost for the cultivation of life. Thus, we establish a dialogue with these ethnographies to analyze the diverse forms of relationality through which these wounded worlds are created, the types of knowledge that they produce, and the politics and tactics of action that they generate vis-à-vis climate and socio-environmental disturbances.

Spiral movement: Writingwithfascism and urban violence

How to move against the rise of the far-right and seemingly unstoppable autocratic leaders in many Western liberal democracies? Antifascism’s interest in the built environment is often limited to the collection of address data of right-wing extremists with the aim of locating its enemies. In this piece, I write with fascism and violence through vignettes of urban situatedness. I adopt an eclectic approach, engaging with diverse theories of violence and establishing loose connections between classical sociology and fascist urbanisation, liberalism in practice and historical fascism, and material aesthetics and right-wing spaces. In so doing, I highlight endemic forms of state and capitalist violence and their spatial manifestations of ghettoisation, beautification and overcoding. Acknowledging the limits of factual knowledge and liberal appeals to the truth in breaking through fascist worldviews of domination, the architecture of the text uses a circular infrastructure that connects various parties: ‘they’ (Twitter users), ‘I’ (author), ‘you’ (Walter Benjamin), and numerous ‘we’ who are thrown together in urban environments. Rather than developing a linear argument that tries to persuade fascists, I explore writing as a collective political practice that refutes totalising accounts. With the aim of opening meaning-makings through returning to and reworking numerous views, I respond to a spiral of violence with a movement that is organised around a shared commitment to an anti-oppressive, non-hierarchical world; a movement that is out of someone’s control and that spirals towards collective liberation.

The Democratic Limits of Populist Politics

The Democratic Limits of Populist Politics

From Queer Necropolitics to Queer Eschatology: Reza Abdoh’s Unsettling Historiography

The theatrical oeuvre of Reza Abdoh has been lauded for its reinvigoration of the avantgarde, its formal and political daring and its astute commentary about the violence of the HIV virus (Fordyce, Carlson, Mufson, Bell). More recently, Abdoh’s work has been taken up as a commentary on neoliberalism—in part because of its politicization of bricolage and pastiche, recalling the more radical possibilities of theorizations of scholars such as Frederic Jameson (Zimmerman). Others have called out the modes by which Abdoh expanded the possibilities of queerness in the early 1990s. Yet no scholar has commented on Abdoh’s engagement of eschatology as a mode of historiography. That is the purpose of this essay. It is under this rubric, rather than an idea of generic postmodern milieu, that I read the multiple and discordant temporalities in Abdoh’s performances. While drawing on theories of the necropolitical (Mbembe) and gore capitalism (Valencia) in relation to conceptions of queer eschatology and capitalist violence, my inquiry emerges from consideration of the structural and theoretical aspects of the art works (“object’s”) themselves. I consider how Father Was a Peculiar Man (1990), performed in the Meatpacking District of Manhattan, exemplifies the historiographical possibilities of performance through its embodiment of an eschatological vision of the world in which the gender binary is performatively undone.

The times and spaces of transplantation: queercrip histories as futurities

With a focus on Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu, this article explores how transplantation is part of the ongoing transformation of being in a body that is of the world....

Late Neoclassical Economics as Neoliberal Neurosis

This commentary reflects on the potential of Madra's Late Neoclassical Economics for comprehending neoliberalism. Extending Madra's work, it presents an ideology critique of late neoclassical economics (LNE) as articulating a social fantasy of harmonious market order that enables neoliberal proponents to structure their reality against the Real of Capital. Madra's exposition of LNE's orientation around the theoretical problematic of neoclassical humanism enables consideration of neoliberalism as informed by an obsessional neurotic logic, whereby subjects postpone encountering the Real via repeated ideological modifications to preserve their fantasy against traumatic incursions. Exploring the conditions of possibility for functioning markets, LNE reinforces the fantasy of market order through theoretical innovations rationalizing increasingly intensive measures to realize it. Thus, symptoms bleeding through gaps between the Symbolic reality of neolibealism and the Real of Capital are disavowed as market and cognitive failures, foreclosing critical engagement with capitalist dynamics. This is illustrated through examining the new institutional economics of development as disavowing the violence of capitalism.

On Data, Media, and the Deconstruction of the Administrative State

On Data, Media, and the Deconstruction of the Administrative State

Documenting Extractive and Indigenous Futurities

The aim of this article is to examine how different modes of moving image practice can expose and critique the impacts of extractive capitalism and settler colonialism on Indigenous communities in northern Canada. The article focuses on the work of two contemporary artist-filmmakers, Thirza Cuthand and Thomas Kneubühler. Their work has consistently engaged with the impacts of late capitalist violence and power within the context of settler-colonial Canada. The article argues that these filmmakers’ engagements and critiques of such formations of power are built around radically different framings and conceptualizations of futurity—as both a dominant logic within the exploitative rationale of extractive capitalist speculation and projection (Kneubühler), but also as a potential catalyst for Indigenous decolonization and self-determination (Cuthand).

Struggles in defense of life within the context of dispossession and capitalist violence in Mexico: a closer look through the lens of the production of the common

ABSTRACT Indigenous and peasant communities in Latin America face an extractivist offensive characterized by multiple processes of dispossession and violence. These processes pose an existential threat to the territorial resources and means of existence that ensure sustenance and facilitate reproduction of life for both humans and non-humans. In this text, I provide a brief overview of the emergence of the Mexican indigenous movement in the 1990s and the recent proliferation of indigenous and peasant struggles focused on the defense of life. Deploying the central concepts of ‘production of the common’ and ‘entramados comunitarios’, I analyze the dynamics of community organization and struggle in response to the onslaught and consequences of extractivism.