Cross-posted from Bekhsoos.com

When teta passed away in February, my father and I hadn’t spoken to each other for over two years. My relationship with him had always been complicated, him being the proud, sensitive, and eccentric man that he is, and me being the dignified and stubborn nerdy kid with a bent for justice at home and beyond. Neither of us had understood what it really meant for me to be growing up here and for him to still be surviving day after day in the harsh city that is Beirut. We lived in the same small apartment with the rest of the family, and for the longest time I gave him the silent treatment, and he only addressed me to insult me when he felt angry. Shaken, I usually pretended he wasn’t there. Click to continue.

As activists, we replicate the bullshit that’s outside of activism scenes, and we do all of this while persuaded that we’re actually better than everyone else. Smug.

“By ‘an activist mentality’ what I mean is that people think of themselves primarily as activists and as belonging to some wider community of activists. The activist identifies with what they do and thinks of it as their role in life, like a job or career. In the same way some people will identify with their job as a doctor or a teacher, and instead of it being something they just happen to be doing, it becomes an essential part of their self-image.

The activist is a specialist or an expert in social change. To think of yourself as being an activist means to think of yourself as being somehow privileged or more advanced than others in your appreciation of the need for social change, in the knowledge of how to achieve it and as leading or being in the forefront of the practical struggle to create this change.

Activism, like all expert roles, has its basis in the division of labour — it is a specialised separate task. The division of labour is the foundation of class society, the fundamental division being that between mental and manual labour. The division of labour operates, for example, in medicine or education — instead of healing and bringing up kids being common knowledge and tasks that everyone has a hand in, this knowledge becomes the specialised property of doctors and teachers — experts that we must rely on to do these things for us. Experts jealously guard and mystify the skills they have. This keeps people separated and disempowered and reinforces hierarchical class society.”

From Give Up Activism, a must read.

“[Adrienne and Audre] I had a few questions for you, but it’s too late now. I wanted to ask you about your communities, were they harmonious as they sounded? Did you not belittle each other’s work? Did you not betray one another? Did you exclude one another, until everyone excluded everyone? Did you become what these wounds made of you? Did you try to survive against all odds, but also against one another? Did you take in all the violence, all the discrimination, all the tactics of patriarchy and reflected it onto one another? Did you? Did you become a feminist version of your own societies– resources and power in the hands of the few? Did you hate one another, and did this hate drive you to silence each other? Blackmail one another? Did you fight, and did those fights preoccupy you from challenging what’s out there? Did you have to protect yourselves from your communities as much as you protect yourself from racism, sexism, and homophobia? Did you forget about what brought you together in the first place? Did you not learn how to forgive one other, and have faith in one another? Did you use your privileges against one another?”

On solidarity and imperialism

Powerful acts of solidarity can exist, but only when activism invests in historicizing local struggles and drawing links with imperialism. So if you’re a US-based LGBT activist, learn your local history of LGBT struggles to analyze whys/whats of today’s mainstream discourse; and then see the workings of imperialism (or how that same mainstream/irrelevant LGBT discourse sneaks its way into places like Lebanon).

The aim of the “Between Deleuze and Foucault” project is to establish an on-going collaborative and synergistic relationship between Purdue University and the Université de Paris VIII–Vincennes à St. Denis (University of Paris 8, Vincennes-St. Denis) in order to transcribe, translate, and make available online the seminars that the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze gave on Michel Foucault’s work at the University of Paris 8 during the years 1985-1986. 

Linkages and articulations.

By the term ‘post-colonial’ we do not imply an automatic, nor a seamless and unchanging process of resistance but a series of linkages and articulations without which the process cannot be properly addressed. These linkages and articulations are not always directly oppositional; the material practices of post-colonial societies may involve a wide range of activities including conceptions and actions which are, or appear to be, complicit with the imperial entreprise. However, such complicity in all oppositional discourse, since they point to the difficulties involved in escaping from dominant discursive practices which limit and define the possibility of opposition. Settler colonies, precisely because their filiative metaphors of connection problematize the idea of resistance as a simple binarism, articulate the ambivalent, complex and processual nature of all imperial relations (3). -Post-Colonial Studies Reader, “General Introduction.”

Everything.

No one ever talks about the moment you found that you were white. Or the moment you found out you were black. That’s a profound revelation. The minute you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything.

— Toni Morrison