Dana Francisco Miranda

My project works with the philosophical concepts of history, memory, and narrative to approach monuments. I seek to show how monuments can be understood within the framework of Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire—constructions that function to keep alive the past by protecting against the erasure of history. In drawing this comparison, I aim to reveal how tragedies demand the construction of a narrative and that monuments, as sites of memory (lieux de memoire), articulate this narrative. It is the very impossibility of a linear, historical narrative, which induces a collective memory-fiction; collective myth making is substituted in the place of history. These narratives that we find articulated by monuments—often of survival, overcoming, and patriotism—are not, however, fixed or permanent; rather they are, and must necessarily be, constantly re-written. Monuments, therefore, do not petrify or close thinking about tragic events but rather leave open and call for future interpretations of the past by the nation-state.

Through reading Hannah Arendt and Frantz Fanon together, territoriality can be seen as the quintessence of colonialism and its attendant freedoms. In particular, the inattentiveness that Arendt manifests regarding how the US founders instantiated a settler colonial politics of primitive accumulation and violent exclusion motivates a renewed appreciation around the question of land. By detailing the ways in which land is still an operative question within Arendtian publics, it becomes apparent that spaces of appearance are entwined with both geography and territory. Importantly, by creolizing spaces of appearance, one gains the use of Arendtian conceptions of freedom without the attendant deficiencies of exclusion and territorialism. Moreover, by disclosing the settler colonial logic within Arendt’s treatment of the US republic, one better understands wretched spaces and the intimate connections between politics, land, and freedom. This is a proof of the chapter. For citations, please use the official version.

For many, the phrase “Black Lives Matter” is synonymous with protests and demonstrations against anti-Black racism and police brutality. However, how activists and organizations relate to this phrase is complex. The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGN or the “Foundation”) is a highly visible and recognizable organization but is only a fraction of the broader Movement for Black Lives (M4BL). This relationship is significant as BLMGN has found itself in the middle of debates questioning its leadership. As a “chapter-based, member-led” organization, the Foundation has been criticized by individual chapters, family members of the deceased, and the broader public for lacking accountability and transparency. I find this criticism warranted.

It is a long, hot summer night in June. A red night that recalls the racial violence of 1919 and the uprisings of 1967, except this night is now. In the North End of Boston, protesters who have taken to the street to proclaim that Black Lives Matter also decapitate a statue of Christopher Columbus in the city’s Christopher Columbus Waterfront Park. This headless figure joins the many other statues that have been toppled or defaced across the globe. Yet, why did Columbus find himself the victim of such a public beheading? For citations, please use the official version in Disegno: The Quarterly Journal of Design 27, p. 20-24.

The work of the Afro-Martinican psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon is crucial to understanding the psychological and socio-political causes of disorder. Drawing upon his corpus, this article details the radical potential for disalienation located within his sociodiagnostic method and argues that personal and structural well-being can only be achieved together. This article will also analyze both psychiatric and phenomenological models of depression as experienced by Africana people in order to better illuminate the usefulness of sociodiagnostics.

Since the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012, the United States has seen the coalescing of black protestors and activists along with their multiracial collaborators under the banner of Movement for Black Lives (M4BL). This struggle against racialized violence, police brutality, and white supremacy has been witnessed in myriad ways, with two of its most prominent “reactions” occurring in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland. Within this struggle, the organization Black Lives Matter (BLM) has chosen to follow a “leader-full” model that replaces traditional hierarchical forms of leadership for that of collaboration and decentralization. This chapter thus seeks to highlight the competing notions of centralized and decentralized leadership within black liberation movements to better understand this model. Using the works of Barbara Ransby, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, and Frantz Fanon, this work will explore forms of black leadership that articulate alternative modes of accountability, service, and well-being within the struggle for black livability. For citations, please use the official version in The Movement for Black Lives: Philosophical Perspectives.

According to a Marxist code of evaluation, slavery seems to be an institution existing as an outdated anachronism, an economic remnant from a past phase in the historical development of man, as yet still present in modern economics as a defect. Upon further readings, Karl Marx clearly articulates that slavery is an integral part of the existent economic model, i.e. capitalism, both in industry and in agriculture. The separation of town and country according to a Marxist conception of history however leads to two distinct types of labor being present in capitalism; in agriculture slavery is blatant and honest in appearance, while in industry slavery is now disguised as 'free' labor. More importantly, by looking at Marx's criticism of direct slavery we are better able to understand his criticisms of free labor, indirect slavery. The primary question of Marxism then becomes: What material condition precipitates the transition of direct slavery to that of indirect 'metaphorical' slavery or free labor? Why did chattel slavery as an economic institution end, and what were the material historical conditions that necessitated the transition from Wall Street to Wall Street? I want to know the fundamental relationship between slavery and capital. This paper then is more fundamentally an exploratory examination of whether or not Marx gives a compelling account for the material end of slavery as well as slavery's relation to capital. I thus examined how and why the division of town/country and industry/agriculture marked the differences between these kinds of slavery, and how this material condition then led to direct slavery's ending as an economic model in agriculture. By navigating the implications of slavery upon agriculture and the development of capital a much deeper analysis begins with questioning the 'necessity' of historical developments and the creation of 'historical necessity'. In the interstices of history, cause and effect, agricultural slavery and capitalism, are much cloudier then Marx would have us believe.

Drawing on the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, this contribution will examine commemorative practices alongside critical modes of historical engagement. In Untimely Meditations, Friedrich Nietzsche documents three historical methodologies—the monumental, antiquarian and critical—which purposely use history in non-objective ways. In particular, critical history desires to judge and reject historical figures rather than repeat the past or venerate the dead. For instance, in recent protests against racism there have also been calls to decolonize public space through the defacement, destruction, and removal of monuments. There is thus much potential in critical history being used to address ongoing harms.

Through transatlantic contact and subsequent debates, the “humanity” of Amerindians was first established for Europeans according to the dictates of philosophical anthropology and theology. This hierarchical and colonial anthropology is problematic precisely because it normalizes a singular, indigenous way of “being human” as the only correct and universal formulation of the “human being,” i.e., Man. Consequently, people that live outside this constructed definition are exposed to dispossession, dehumanization, and genocide because they are deemed outside the bounds of Mankind. Through a three-part analysis, this work will examine Bartolomé de Las Casas’ categorization of Amerindians though his formulation of “barbarianism,” compare this taxonomy with Orson Scott Card’s “Hierarchy of Foreignness,” and finally argue that Indigenous traditions of thought—as seen in “grounded normativity” and “place-thought”—allow not only for the dissolution of colonial anthropologies but also permit for a teleological suspension of Man.