CONVENERS – Dallas Rogers, Naama Blatman & Tooran Alizadeh
ABOUT – We’re a group of scholars working across a number of fields and intellectual traditions. We come together to read and discuss new ideas with relevance to our teaching and research. The group has a broad interest in developing our knowledge of critical theory as it pertains to a range of other theoretical traditions, empirical fields and geographical regions. By closely reading and debating new and old books we aim to enhance and enrich our research, teaching and practice in ways that further challenge the structures we are all embedded in. This includes, but is certainly not limited to, the Australian academy itself.
Publications
The following are some of the publications enriched by the discussions of the group:
- Empire of Dissent, by Nicholas Bromfield, Rebecca Clements, Jake Davies, Natalie Osborne, Dallas Rogers, Somwrita Sarkar, Pranita Shrestha and Catherine Townsend, 2022
- Shaking up the City: Ignorance, inequality and the urban question, by Dallas Rogers, in Urban Studies, 2021
- Geography of Blood Meridian: Primitive accumulation on the frontier of space, by Adam David Morton, in Political Geography, 91, 2021
- Decolonisation and methodological nationalism: placing empire at the centre of the analysis, by Dallas Rogers, Jake Davies, Pranita Shrestha and Xiao Ma, in Society and Space Magazine in August 2021
- Review of (B)ordering Britain: Law, race and empire by Nadine El-Enany, by Jake Davies, in Journal of Intercultural Studies, 42(5), 2021
⁂
The Surrounds: Urban Life Within and Beyond Capture
Our last book for 2022 is The Surrounds: Urban Life Within and Beyond Capture by AbdouMaliq Simone, published by Duke.
In The Surrounds renowned urbanist AbdouMaliq Simone offers a new theorization of the interface of the urban and the political. Working at the intersection of Black studies, urban theory, and decolonial and Islamic thought, Simone centers the surrounds—those urban spaces beyond control and capture that exist as a locus of rebellion and invention. He shows that even in clearly defined city environments, whether industrial, carceral, administrative, or domestic, residents use spaces for purposes they were not designed for: schools become housing, markets turn into classrooms, tax offices transform into repair shops. The surrounds, Simone contends, are where nothing fits according to design. They are where forgotten and marginalized populations invent new relations and ways of living and being, continuously reshaping what individuals and collectives can do. Focusing less on what new worlds may come to be and more on what people are creating now, Simone shows how the surrounds are an integral part of the expansiveness of urban imagination.
Schedule – to be confirmed
|
DATE |
TIME |
CHAPTER |
CHAIR |
READER |
|
2nd Nov |
12-1 |
Introduction Exposing the Surrounds as Urban Infrastructure |
||
|
9th Nov |
12-1 |
1. Without Capture: From Extinction to Abolition |
||
|
16th Nov |
12-1 |
2. Forgetting Being Forgotten |
||
|
23rd Nov |
12-1 |
3. Rebellion without Redemption + Coda: Extensions beyond Value |
⁂
Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States
September and October 2022
Our fourth book for 2022 is Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States by Audra Simpson, published by Duke University Press.
Description – Mohawk Interruptus is a bold challenge to dominant thinking in the fields of Native studies and anthropology. Combining political theory with ethnographic research among the Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke, a reserve community in what is now southwestern Quebec, Audra Simpson examines their struggles to articulate and maintain political sovereignty through centuries of settler colonialism. The Kahnawà:ke Mohawks are part of the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy. Like many Iroquois peoples, they insist on the integrity of Haudenosaunee governance and refuse American or Canadian citizenship. Audra Simpson thinks through this politics of refusal, which stands in stark contrast to the politics of cultural recognition. Tracing the implications of refusal, Simpson argues that one sovereign political order can exist nested within a sovereign state, albeit with enormous tension around issues of jurisdiction and legitimacy. Finally, Simpson critiques anthropologists and political scientists, whom, she argues, have too readily accepted the assumption that the colonial project is complete. Belying that notion, Mohawk Interruptus calls for and demonstrates more robust and evenhanded forms of inquiry into indigenous politics in the teeth of settler governance.
Schedule – to be confirmed
|
DATE |
TIME |
CHAPTER |
CHAIR |
READER |
| 14th Sept |
12-1 |
1. Indigenous Interruptions: Mohawk Nationhood, Citizenship, and the State |
Naama Blatman | Dallas Rogers |
| 21st Sept |
12-1 |
2. A Brief History of Land, Meaning, and Membership in Iroquoia and Kahnawà:ka |
Tooran Alizadeh | |
| 28th Sept |
12-1 |
3. Constructing Kahnawà:ka as an “Out-of-the-Way” Place: Ely S. Parker, Lewis Henry Morgan, and the Writing of the Iroquois Confederacy |
Dallas Rogers | |
| 5th Oct |
12-1 |
4. Ethnographic Refusal: Anthropological Need |
Naama Blatman | |
|
12th Oct |
12-1 |
5. Borders, Cigarettes, and Sovereignty |
Tooran Alizadeh | |
|
19th Oct |
12-1 |
6. The Gender of the Flint: Mohawk Nationhood and Citizenship in the Face of Empire + Conclusion. Interruptus |
Dallas Rogers |
⁂
Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition
Our third book for 2022 is Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition by Cedric J Robinson, published by Penguin.
July and August 2022
Description – A foundational work of Black Radical critical theory, now to be widely available here for the first time. Any struggle must be fought on a people’s own terms, argues Cedric Robinson’s landmark account of Black radicalism. Marxism is a western construction, and therefore inadequate to describe the significance of Black communities as agents of change against ‘racial capitalism’. Tracing the emergence of European radicalism, the history of Black African resistance and the influence of these on such key thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James and Richard Wright, Black Marxism reclaims the story of a movement.
Read this review of Black Marxism: The Making Of The Black Radical Tradition by Austin Smidt.
Below is a talk by Robin D. G. Kelley on What is Racial Capitalism and Why Does It Matter? It’s a handy introduction to the concept of racial capitalism.
Schedule – to be confirmed
|
DATE |
TIME |
CHAPTER |
CHAIR |
READER |
|
13th July |
12-1 |
1. Racial Capitalism + 2. The English Working Class as the Mirror of Production |
||
|
20th July |
12-1 |
3. Socialist Theory and Nationalism + 4. Process and Consequences of Africa’s Transmutation |
Nicholas Bromfield | |
|
27th July |
12-1 |
5. The Atlantic Slave Trade and African Labor + 6. The Historical Archaeology of the Black Radical Tradition |
||
|
3rd Aug |
12-1 |
7. The Nature of the Black Radical Tradition + 8. The Formation of an Intelligentsia |
||
|
10th Aug |
12-1 |
9. Historiography and the Black Radical Tradition + 10. C.L.R James and the Black Radical Tradition |
||
|
17th Aug |
12-1 |
11. Richard Wright and the Critique of Class Theory + Conclusion |
⁂
The Colonizing Self: Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine
Our second book for 2022 is The Colonizing Self: Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine by Hagar Kotef, published by Duke University Press.
April and June 2022
Description – Colonizers continuously transform spaces of violence into spaces of home. Israeli Jews settle in the West Bank and in depopulated Palestinian houses in Haifa or Jaffa. White missionaries build their lives in Africa. The descendants of European settlers in the Americas and Australia dwell and thrive on expropriated indigenous lands. In The Colonizing Self Hagar Kotef traces the cultural, political, and spatial apparatuses that enable people and nations to settle on the ruins of other people’s homes.
Kotef demonstrates how the mass and structural modes of violence that are necessary for the establishment and sustainment of the colony dwell within settler-colonial homemaking, and through it shape collective and individual identities. She thus powerfully shows how the possibility to live amid the destruction one generates is not merely the possibility to turn one’s gaze away from violence but also the possibility to develop an attachment to violence itself. Kotef thereby offers a theoretical framework for understanding how settler-colonial violence becomes inseparable from one’s sense of self.
The University of Sydney Library link here
Schedule – to be confirmed
|
DATE |
TIME |
CHAPTER |
CHAIR |
READER |
|
6th April |
12-1 |
Preface + Introduction- Home |
Naama Blatman | Dallas Rogers |
|
13th April |
12-1 |
Theoretical Overview | Tooran Alizadeh | Dallas Rogers |
|
20th April |
12-1 |
Home/Homelessness: A reading in Arendt |
Dallas Rogers | Blanche Verlie |
|
27th April |
12-1 |
1_The Consuming self- On Locke, Aristotle, Feminist theory, and domestic violences |
Tooran Alizadeh | Naama Blatman |
|
4th May |
12-1 |
Unsettlement |
Tooran Alizadeh | Pranita Shrestha |
|
11th May |
12-1 |
USYD Strike: No Reading Group. Solidarity ✊ |
||
|
18th May |
12-1 |
A brief reflection on death and decolonisation 2. Home_and the ruins that remain |
Dallas Rogers | |
|
25th May |
12-1 |
A phenomenology of violence: ruins |
Tooran Alizadeh | |
|
1st June |
12-1 |
A moment of popular culture_The home of MasterChef |
Naama Blatman | Rebecca Clements |
|
15th June |
12-1 |
3_On eggs and dispossession_Organic agriculture and the New Settlement Movement |
Dallas Rogers | Dallas Rogers |
|
22nd June |
12-1 |
An ethic of violence_organics washing |
Tooran Alizadeh | Nicholas Bromfield |
⁂
Shaking up the City: Ignorance, Inequality and the Urban Question
Our first book for 2022 is Shaking up the city: ignorance, inequality and the urban question by Tom Slater, published by University of California Press.
February and March 2022
Description – Shaking Up the City critically examines many of the concepts and categories within mainstream urban studies that serve dubious policy agendas. Through a combination of theory and empirical evidence, Tom Slater “shakes up” mainstream urban studies in a concise and pointed fashion by turning on its head much of the prevailing wisdom in the field. To this end, he explores the themes of data-driven innovation, urban resilience, gentrification, displacement and rent control, neighborhood effects, territorial stigmatization, and ethnoracial segregation.
With important contributions to ongoing debates in sociology, geography, urban planning, and public policy, this book engages closely with struggles for land rights and housing justice to offer numerous insights for scholarship and political action to guard against the spread of an urbanism rooted in vested interest.
The University of Sydney Library link here
Read a book review by Dallas Rogers: Shaking up the City Review
Schedule
|
DATE |
TIME |
CHAPTER |
CHAIR |
READER |
|
2nd February |
12 – 1 |
Foreward & 1. Challenging the Heteronomy of Urban Research |
Naama Blatman | Dallas Rogers |
|
9th February |
12 – 1 |
2. The resilience of neoliberal urbanism |
Dallas Rogers | Pranita Shrestha |
|
16th February |
12 – 1 |
3 Gentrification beyond False Choice Urbanism |
Naama Blatman | Tooran Alizadeh |
|
23rd February |
12 – 1 |
4. Displacement, rent control, and housing justice |
Dallas Rogers | Andrew Clarke |
|
2nd March |
12 – 1 |
5. Neighborhood Effects as Tautological Urbanism |
Dallas Rogers | Rebecca Clements |
|
9th March |
12 – 1 |
6. The production and activation of territorial stigma |
Naama Blatman | Alistair Sisson |
|
16th March |
12 – 1 |
7. Ghetto Blasting |
Natalie Osborne | |
|
23rd March |
12 – 1 |
8 Some possibilities for critical urban studies |
Dallas Rogers | Naama Blatman |
⁂
The Asset Economy
Our fourth and final book for 2021 is The Asset Economy, by Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings, published by Polity.
November 2021
Description – Rising inequality is the defining feature of our age. With the lion’s share of wealth growth going to the top, for a growing percentage of society a middle-class existence is out of reach. What exactly are the economic shifts that have driven the social transformations taking place in Anglo-capitalist societies? Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings argue that the rise of the asset economy has produced a new logic of inequality. Several decades of property inflation have seen asset ownership overshadow employment as a determinant of class position. Exploring the impact of generational dynamics in this new class landscape, the book advances an original perspective on a range of phenomena that are widely debated but poorly understood – including the growth of wealth inequalities and precarity, the dynamics of urban property inflation, changes in fiscal and monetary policy and the predicament of the “millennial” generation. Despite widespread awareness of the harmful effects of Quantitative Easing and similar asset-supporting measures, we appear to have entered an era of policy “lock-in” that is responsible for a growing disconnect between popular expectations and institutional priorities. The resulting polarization underlies many of the volatile dynamics and rapidly shifting alliances that dominate today’s headlines.
The University of Sydney Library link here
Schedule
|
DATE |
TIME |
CHAPTER |
CHAIR |
READER |
|
17 November |
12 – 1 |
Introduction + Asset logics + The making of the asset economy |
||
|
24 November |
12 – 1 |
New class realities + Conclusion |
⁂
Sydney Boom, Sydney Bust: The City And Its Property Market, 1850-1981
Special session with the Urban Crew
We’re excited to be revisiting this seminal work Sydney Boom, Sydney Bust (Allen & Unwin, 1982) by Australian geographer and former University of Sydney Professor Maurice T Daly. Sadly, Maurice passed away in 2021. You can read a statement by Bill Pritchard here.
Description – At the heart of Daly’s exploration of Sydney is an interrogation of the implications of the property cycle on Australians. Daly predicted what now appears daily in the property pages of our national newspapers, and the quiet desperation of the suburban poor:
“At the end of it all the city had sprawled even further; services were even more inadequate; the young and the poor were relatively worse off; investment funds which might have been put into production or socially useful activities had been dissipated; and millions of dollars of small investors’ funds had been lost as sharks and charlatans grew rich,” writes Daly.
Schedule
|
DATE |
TIME |
CHAPTER |
CHAIR |
|
3 September |
10 – 11 |
1. The story of a boom, 1968-74 | |
|
10 September |
10 – 11 |
2. Office builders, 1966-81 | |
|
17 September |
10 – 11 |
3. Finance companies_ fuelling the flames | |
|
24 September |
10 – 11 |
4. Subdividers, speculators and the games people play | |
|
8 October |
10 – 11 |
5. Origins of boom and bust | |
|
15 October |
10 – 11 |
6. Consequences of boom and bust | |
|
22 October |
10 – 11 |
7. Our cities, our sins |
⁂
Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent
Our third book for 2021 is Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent, by Priyamvada Gopal and published by Verso.
August to October 2021
Description – How rebellious colonies changed British attitudes to empire. Insurgent Empire shows how Britain’s enslaved and colonial subjects were active agents in their own liberation. What is more, they shaped British ideas of freedom and emancipation back in the United Kingdom. Priyamvada Gopal examines a century of dissent on the question of empire and shows how British critics of empire were influenced by rebellions and resistance in the colonies, from the West Indies and East Africa to Egypt and India. In addition, a pivotal role in fomenting resistance was played by anticolonial campaigners based in London, right at the heart of empire. Much has been written on how colonized peoples took up British and European ideas and turned them against empire when making claims to freedom and self-determination. Insurgent Empire sets the record straight in demonstrating that these people were much more than victims of imperialism or, subsequently, the passive beneficiaries of an enlightened British conscience—they were insurgents whose legacies shaped and benefited the nation that once oppressed them.
The University of Sydney Library link here
Schedule
| DATE | TIME | CHAPTER | CHAIR | READER |
| 4 August | 12 – 1 | Introduction | Tooran Alizadeh | Dallas Rogers |
| 11 August | 12 – 1 | 1. The spirt of the sepoy host | Dallas Rogers | Somwrita Sarkar |
| 18 August | 12 – 1 | 2. A barbaric Independence | Dallas Rogers | Diti Bhattacharya |
| 25 August | 12 – 1 | 3. The Accidental Anticolonialist | Dallas Rogers | Rebecca Clements |
| 1 September | 12 – 1 | 4. Passages to Internationalism | Tooran Alizadeh | Jake Davies |
| 8 September | 12 – 1 | 5. The Interpreter of Insurgencies | Dallas Rogers | Pranita Shrestha |
| 29 September | 12 – 1 | 6. The Revolt of the Oppressed World | Tooran Alizadeh | Caitlin Buckle |
| 6 October | 12 – 1 | 7. Black Voices Matter | Dallas Rogers | Naama Blatman |
| 13 October | 12 – 1 | 8. Internationalising African Opinion | Tooran Alizadeh | Somwrita Sarkar |
| 20 October | 12 – 1 | 9. Smash Our Own Imperialism | Dallas Rogers | Catherine Townsend |
| 27 October | 12 – 1 |
10. A Terrible Assertion of Discontent + Epilogue |
Tooran Alizadeh | |
| 3 November | 12 – 1 |
Sydney Review of Books – Writing Workshop |
Dallas Rogers |
⁂
(B)ordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire
Our second book for 2021 is (B)ordering Britain: Law, race and empire by Nadine El-Enany and published by Manchester University Press.
April and May 2021
Description – (B)ordering Britain argues that Britain is the spoils of empire, its immigration law is colonial violence and irregular immigration is anti-colonial resistance. In announcing itself as postcolonial through immigration and nationality laws passed in the 60s, 70s and 80s, Britain cut itself off symbolically and physically from its colonies and the Commonwealth, taking with it what it had plundered. This imperial vanishing act cast Britain’s colonial history into the shadows. The British Empire, about which Britons know little, can be remembered fondly as a moment of past glory, as a gift once given to the world. Meanwhile immigration laws are justified on the basis that they keep the undeserving hordes out. In fact, immigration laws are acts of colonial seizure and violence. They obstruct the vast majority of racialised people from accessing colonial wealth amassed in the course of colonial conquest. Regardless of what the law, media and political discourse dictate, people with personal, ancestral or geographical links to colonialism, or those existing under the weight of its legacy of race and racism, have every right to come to Britain and take back what is theirs.
The University of Sydney Library link here
Schedule
| DATE | TIME | CHAPTER | SESSION LEAD |
| 14th April 2021 | 12 – 1pm | Introduction: Britain as the spoils of empire | Dallas Rogers |
| 21st April 2021 | 12 – 1pm | 1. Bordering and ordering | Shanthi Robertson |
| 28th April 2021 | 12 – 1pm | 2. Aliens: immigration law’s racial architecture | Rebecca Clements |
| 5th May 2021 | 12 – 1pm | 3. Subjects and citizens: cordoning off colonial spoils | Jake Davies |
| 12th May 2021 | 12 – 1pm | 4. Migrants, refugees and asylum seekers: predictable arrivals | Andrew Burridge |
| 19th May 2021 | 12 – 1pm | 5. European citizens and third country nationals: Europe’s colonial embrace | Tooran Alizadeh |
| 26th May 2021 | 12 – 1pm | Conclusion- ‘Go home’ as an invitation to stay | Dallas Rogers |
⁂
Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World
Our first book for 2021 is Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World by Gary Wilder and published by Duke University Press.
February and March 2021
Description – Freedom Time reconsiders decolonization from the perspectives of Aimé Césaire (Martinique) and Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal) who, beginning in 1945, promoted self-determination without state sovereignty. As politicians, public intellectuals, and poets they struggled to transform imperial France into a democratic federation, with former colonies as autonomous members of a transcontinental polity. In so doing, they revitalized past but unrealized political projects and anticipated impossible futures by acting as if they had already arrived. Refusing to reduce colonial emancipation to national independence, they regarded decolonization as an opportunity to remake the world, reconcile peoples, and realize humanity’s potential. Emphasizing the link between politics and aesthetics, Gary Wilder reads Césaire and Senghor as pragmatic utopians, situated humanists, and concrete cosmopolitans whose postwar insights can illuminate current debates about self-management, postnational politics, and planetary solidarity. Freedom Time invites scholars to decolonize intellectual history and globalize critical theory, to analyze the temporal dimensions of political life, and to question the territorialist assumptions of contemporary historiography.
The University of Sydney Library link here
Schedule
| DATE | TIME | CHAPTER | SESSION LEAD |
| 3rd February 2021 | 12 – 1pm | 1. Unthinking France, Rethinking Decolonization | Adam Morton |
| 10th February 2021 | 12 – 1pm | 2. Situating Césaire- Antillean Awakening and Global Redemption | Sha Liu |
| 17th February 2021 | 12 – 1pm | 3. Situating Senghor: African Hospitality and Human Solidarity | Caitlin Buckle |
| 24th February 2021 | 12 – 1pm | 4. Freedom, Time, Territory | Matthew Gill |
| 3rd March 2021 | 12 – 1pm | 5. Departmentalization and the Spirit of Schoelcher | Cameron McAuliffe |
| 10th March 2021 | 12 – 1pm | 6. Federalism and the Future of France | Greta Werner |
| 17th March 2021 | 12 – 1pm | 7. Antillean Autonomy and the Legacy of Louverture | Pranita Shrestha |
| 24th March 2021 | 12 – 1pm | 8. African Socialism and the Fate of the World | Rebecca Clements |
| 31st March 2021 | 12 – 1pm | 9. Decolonization and Postnational Democracy | Nathan Etherington |
⁂
Theft Is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory
Our first book for 2020 is Theft Is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory byRobert Nichols and published by Duke University Press.
November and December 2020
Description – Drawing on Indigenous peoples’ struggles against settler colonialism, Theft Is Property! reconstructs the concept of dispossession as a means of explaining how shifting configurations of law, property, race, and rights have functioned as modes of governance, both historically and in the present. Through close analysis of arguments by Indigenous scholars and activists from the nineteenth century to the present, Robert Nichols argues that dispossession has come to name a unique recursive process whereby systematic theft is the mechanism by which property relations are generated. In so doing, Nichols also brings long-standing debates in anarchist, Black radical, feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial thought into direct conversation with the frequently overlooked intellectual contributions of Indigenous peoples.
Schedule
| DATE | TIME | CHAPTER | SESSION LEAD |
| 11th November 2020 | 12pm – 1pm | Introduction 1. That Sole and Despotic Dominion |
Dallas Rogers |
| 18th November 2020 | 1pm – 2pm | 2. Marx, after the Feast | Adam Morton |
| 25th November 2020 | 12pm – 1pm | 3. Indigenous Structural Critique | Naama Blatman |
| 2nd December 2020 | 12pm – 1pm | 4. Dilemmas of Self-Ownership, Rituals of Antiwill | Alistair Sisson |
| 9th December 2020 | 12pm – 1pm | Conclusion | Pratichi Chatterjee |
Reading Group Ethics
The group is committed to the following three key reading group ethics.
- Acknowledge – We will formally acknowledge the reading group in any published works that draw on ideas generated or refined through this reading group (see sample text* below, which can be inserted into publications);
- Build – Any publications emerging out of the reading group will focus on HDR and ECR mentoring and capacity building as their purpose; and
- Collaborate – We will use the read group to explore old and new collaborative writing opportunities.
Formal acknowledgment
- While the ideas and any mistakes in this work are our own, we are grateful for the stimulating conversations we have been having with the Place, Race and Critical Theory Reading Group at the University of Sydney, with whom we read and discussed the ideas in this work.
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