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think, bitch! think!

A lecture  by Professor Rosi Braidotti (Utrecht University): 'Nomadic Feminist Theory in a Global Era'.

Rosi Braidotti is Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University and founding Director of the Centre for the Humanities since 2007. She was the founding professor of 
Gender Studies in the Humanities at Utrecht (1988-2005) and the first scientific director of the Netherlands Research School of Women's Studies. 

Rosi Braidotti’s research and writing engages feminist philosophy and cultural studies. She is especially interested in poststructuralism and critical theory as well as epistemology and Deleuze studies. Her books include, Nomadic Theory. The Portable Rosi Braidotti (Columbia University Press: New York, 2011); Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Polity Press: Cambridge, 2006); Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Polity Press: Cambridge, 2002); and Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, (Columbia University Press: New York, 1994); 2nd ed. 2011). 

Rosi Braidotti - Nomadic Feminist Theory in a Global Era.

Fred Moten Lecture, 3/13/14

Rosi Braidotti @ ICI in Berlin, Oct. 7, 2014

Thinking as a Nomadic Subject

This lecture outlines the key concepts and founding principles of nomadic thought as a theoretical practice in the context of economic and cultural globalization. At the start of the third millennium, in an age of global and differentiated mobility, a diffuse sort of nomadism defines the location of many subjects. Mobility however does not resolve power differences and other forms of structural inequality and in some ways it even intensifies them. How to draw ethical and political cartographies of different modes of mobility is a key issue. Following post-structuralist, post-colonial, and feminist debates on the issue of the ‘non-unitary’ subject, issues of fragmentation, complexity, and multiplicity have become household names in critical theory. The ubiquitous nature of these notions, however does not make for consensus about the issues at stake, namely: what exactly are the political and ethical conditions that structure nomadic subjectivity and its multiple forms of mobility? And what are their implications for critical theory, especially in view of the contradictions, the power relations, and the paradoxes of our historical condition? Braidotti argues that nomadic subject should never be taken as a new metaphor for the human condition, but rather as a cartographic tool that helps us compose materialistic mappings of situated, i.e. embedded and embodied, social positions in an age of global hybridity. A cartography is a theoretically-based and politically-informed reading of the present which fulfils the function of providing both analytic and exegetical tools for critical thought and also creative theoretical alternatives. This political passion sustains the process of nomadic writing as ethically accountable and empowering.
(text taken from the ICI website)

Rosi Braidotti - Thinking as a Nomadic Subject

Dr. Pamela Brewer with Dr. Frank B. Wilderson III on Frantz Fanon 11/13/2009

Fred Moten "Blackness and Poetry"

In the Name of the Motherfucker: Naming the White Symbolic Father


How do we name the violence of a paradigm of antiblackness that is still going? Hortense Spillers essay "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book" outlines a revolutionary theory of the violence that created and continues to create Blackness through the rape, murder, incarceration, and misnaming of Black people by a central figure in the psychic formation of western society: the Name of the (white) Father. Spillers reading helps us understand Fanon's notion that African "metaphysics [were]...abolished [by] a new civilization that imposed its own" and calls for a radical renaming of Black people by ourselves.

Black "fathers" or "father figures" have no structural power. The position has been taken by the structural position of the Master. But it would be a mistake to call the Master the "Father." Even Thomas Jefferson cannot be called one of the "founding fathers" by Black America. The best one can say of such a structural position (and the people who filled it) is the rapist, the one who "fathers" children by raping "mothers" to reproduce his property and facilitate enjoyment. Spillers calls this the "mocking presence." and really, all it is is one who fucked the mother. hence, the position should be called the "Motherfucker." Since it is a structural position, white women too can occupy it, and Spillers gives an example of this from Harriet Jacobs.

Bio
Omar Ricks is an educator, writer, artist, activist, and baker in Berkeley, California. He holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies with a Designated Emphasis in New Media from UC Berkeley, where he used film, television, literature, and new media to study the ways that the performance of Black leadership is conditioned within, and resistant to, structural antiblackness. Dr. Ricks teaches Africana Studies at the Peralta Colleges in Oakland. He is a member of the editorial collective of The Feminist Wire and has published in TDR, ASTR Online, ERIC Digest, and Slingshot. He helped found the afropessimist blog Cosmic Hoboes.

Fred Moten Lecture, 3/13/14

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