Maximilian C. Forte has an educational background in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Spanish, International Relations, and Anthropology. He lived and studied for seven years in Trinidad & Tobago, for four years in Australia, and for three years in the U.S. He is a dual Italian-Canadian citizen, and had previously achieved Permanent Resident status in Trinidad & Tobago. His primary website is that of the Zero Anthropology Project.
Max is the author of Ruins of Absence, Presence of Caribs: (Post)Colonial Representations of Aboriginality in Trinidad and Tobago (University Press of Florida, 2005), the editor of Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbean: Amerindian Survival And Revival (Peter Lang New York, 2006) and Indigenous Cosmopolitans: Transnational and Transcultural Indigeneity in the Twenty-First Century (Peter Lang New York, 2010). His book, Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa (Baraka Books, 2012), was a finalist for the Quebec Writers Federation Mavis Gallant Prize for Nonfiction. His most recent edited collection in which he has three chapters is Who Is An Indian? Race, Place, and the Politics of Indigeneity in the Americas (University of Toronto Press, 2013). His other publications are listed here, and some are stored at Academia.edu.
Max Forte also publishes The New Imperialism series, which features research by students in his advanced seminar in the field, and his own research.
Max Forte teaches full time in Anthropology and Sociology at Concordia University in Montréal, Québec, at the rank of full Professor, and is a member of the Concordia University Faculty Association (CUFA), the trade union body for full-time faculty, and the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT). He does not, however, speak for any institution as an authorized representative. His views here are his own, and likewise the views of the university do not represent his own.
He teaches courses in the area of Political Anthropology, with related courses and seminars on the New Imperialism, Cultural Imperialism, Indigenous Resurgence, and Globalization, and additional courses on the Caribbean, Decolonizing Anthropology, New Directions in Anthropology, media ethnographies, visual anthropology, and in the past, cyberspace ethnography. As listed here, he has won a number of grants and awards, including two awards for excellence in teaching.
Max’s interviews by various news media are listed here.
He started this site back in October of 2007, when it was called “Open Anthropology” and resembled more of a blog than it does now. On this site Max writes about militarism, the militarization of the social sciences, U.S. foreign policy, imperialism, counterinsurgency, propaganda, surveillance, the Human Terrain System, the Minerva Research Initiative, AFRICOM, and NATO. On a more positive side, he writes about decolonization, anti-imperialism, and struggles for human dignity in the face of empire. He also writes about anthropology after empire, and occasionally produces items about the Caribbean, with a mixture of humorous pieces, video posts, and fiction. His articles on Zero Anthropology have covered topics pertaining to Canada, the U.S., Trinidad & Tobago, Mexico, Zimbabwe, Iran, Iraq, Greece, Gaza, Libya, and Afghanistan. All of these articles are listed on the Contents page of this site.
For select listings of his online essays, see:
- ANTHROPOLOGIES OF ZERO
- CARIBBEAN HISTORY, SOCIETY, POLITICS, AND MUSIC
- CARIBBEAN INDIGENEITY, RESURGENT INDIGENISM
- EMPIRE
- MILITARISM, MILITARIZATION, THE ACADEMY, AND THE HUMAN TERRAIN SYSTEM
- WIKILEAKS, THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE, AND WAR
- “The Best of the Rest”
See his Academia.edu page.
For more, please see the main site for the Zero Anthropology Project.
He can be reached at max.forte@openanthropology.org
