Radical Queer and Global Black Anti-Capitalist Abolition Futures

Luxemburg Lecture, Tuesday, 7th of June 2020, 7 p.m. (CEST)

White supremacy along with COVID-19 have been lethal with 505 500 dead globally so far which disproportionately affects Black, visible minorities and migrants worldwide. Simultaneously, LGBTQ+ and black oppression are inscribed in global racial capitalism that orients itself toward certain possibilities by accessing and experimenting with social reproduction and life.

In her lecture, Anna M. Agathangelou argues that abolition demands of us to understand how certain forms of queerness emerge as an instituted perspective, a frame, and an operation separated from other forms of violence and power. She investigates this emerging instituted perspective from the vantage point of anti-blackness, the global lethality of white supremacy, and global racial capitalism. Employing a radical queer/black feminist anti-capitalist poetics, she argues for the need of a radical anti-capitalist and anti-white supremacy analytical impulse. By grappling with the ways these emerging institutionalities – with regard to radical anti-capitalist queerness and in conjunction with anti-blackness – are moving to imagine anti-capitalist futures beyond the current map of globality whose ontological horizons are limited by raciality. She also engages with Black Lives Matter movement, Audre Lorde and Frantz Fanon´s radical critique of global racial capitalism.  In conclusion, she shows that contemporary Covid-19 structures of violence demand new ways of thinking abolition where queerness and anti-blackness are no longer turned into figures of innovation for capital but rather sites and poetries of unshackling the fetishes and fantasies impoverishing the world.

In cooperation with the Section of Politics and Gender/German Association for Political Sciences  and the working group of Politics and Gender, Institute for Political Sciences, University of Marburg.

Hosted by Katharina Pühl(RLS) und Inga Nüthen (Universität Marburg).

Anna M. Agathangelou teaches at York University, Toronto at the Department of Politics.  She is the co-editor (with Kyle D. Killian) of Time, Temporality and Violence in International Relations. (De)Fatalizing the Present, Forging Radical Alternatives (2016), co-editor of (with Nevzat Soguk) of Arab Revolutions and World Transformations (2013), co-author with L.H.M. Ling, of Transforming World Politics: From Empire to Multiple Worlds (2009) and author of the Global Political Economy of Sex: Desire, Violence and Insecurity in Mediterranean Nation-States (2004).

LIVESTREAM

For questions you can use the YouTube chat, the Facebook chat or this text pad.