Max Haiven

With Bedour Alagraa, Glen Coulthard, Max Haiven, and S.L. Lim (Out of the Woods Collective), moderated by Malav Kanuga.

Capitalism is in a profound state of crisis. Beyond the mere dispassionate cruelty of ‘ordinary’ structural violence, it appears today as a global system bent on reckless economic revenge. Anti-Black and settler colonial revanchism continues, joined by mass incarceration, climate chaos, unpayable debts, pharmaceutical terror and the relentless degradation of common life.

And yet we are also in a moment of revolutionary change, the high water mark of movements seeking to avenge racial capitalism’s devaluation of life. How can we make sense of this moment?

This panel brings together four perspectives on the revenge politics of our moment on the occasion of the publication of Max Haiven’s new book Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (Pluto 2020).

Register through Eventbrite to receive a link to the video conference on the day of the event.

Speakers

Bedour Alagraa is assistant professor of Political and Social Thought in the Department of African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is interested in Black Political Thought, especially Caribbean political thought, African anti-colonial thought, and Black Marxism(s). Her work can be seen in journals such as Critical Ethnic Studies, Contemporary Political Theory, The CLR James Journal of Caribbean Philosophy, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, and others. Bedour is also coeditor, alongside Anthony Bogues, of the ‘Black Critique’ book series at Pluto Press, and is currently working on a coedited volume of Sylvia Wynter’s unpublished essays. Her book manuscript is entitled “The Interminable Catastrophe: Fatal Liberalisms, Plantation Logics, and Black Political Life in the Wake of Disaster.”

Glen Coulthard is Yellowknives Dene and an associate professor in the First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program and the Departments of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), winner of the 2016 Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Frantz Fanon Award for Outstanding Book, the Canadian Political Science Association’s C.B. Macpherson Award for Best Book in Political Theory in 2014/2015, and the Rik Davidson Studies in Political Economy Award for Best Book in 2016. He is also a cofounder of Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning, a decolonial, Indigenous land-based post-secondary program operating on his traditional territories in Denendeh (Northwest Territories).

Max Haiven is Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice and codirector of the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL) at Lakehead University. His recent books include is Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts and Art After Money, Money After Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization.

S.L. Lim’s first novel Real Differences won the Glenda Adams/UTS New Writing Prize in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards 2020. She has appeared at literary festivals including Melbourne and Byron. An earlier version of her second novel, Revenge, was shortlisted for the 2017 Epigram Fiction Manuscript Prize. She is also a member of the Out of the Woods Collective and writes at circuit breakers.

Malav Kanuga is publisher of Common Notions press, an organizer with many grassroots media projects for collective liberation, and a postdoctoral fellow in the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

This event marks the publication of Max Haiven’s Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts as well as Out of the Woods’ Hope Against Hope: Writings on Ecological Crisis.

Cosponsored by Pluto Press and RiVAL