March 23, 2016
London
Foyles
March 18, 2016
London, United Kingdom
Institute of Contemporary Arts
April 20, 2016
London, United Kingdom
Guildhall School of Music & Drama
May 19, 2016
Khalili Lecture Theatre,, SOAS
Khalili Lecture Theatre,, SOAS
Cornel West's "Race and Social Theory: Towards a Genealogical Materialist Analysis" first appeared in The Year Left Vol. 2: Towards a Rainbow Socialism - Essays on Race, Ethnicity, Class, and Gender, edited by Mike Davis, Manning Marable, Fred Pfeil, and Michael Sprinker, and published by Verso in 1987.
(Cornel West, 1988, via The SCI-Arc Media Archive)
In this field of inquiry, sociological theory has still to find its way, by a difficult effort of theoretical clarification, through the Scylla of a reductionism which must deny almost everything in order to explain something, and the Charybdis of a pluralism which is so mesmerized by 'everything’ that it cannot explain anything. To those willing to labour on, the vocation remains an open one. - Stuart Hall
We live in the midst of a pervasive and profound crisis of North Atlantic civilization whose symptoms include the threat of nuclear annihilation, extensive class inequality, brutal state repression, subtle bureaucratic surveillance, widespread homophobia, technological abuse of nature and rampant racism and patriarchy. In this essay, I shall focus on a small yet significant aspect of this crisis: the specific forms of Afro-American oppression. It is important to stress that one can more fully understand this part only in light of the whole crisis, and that one’s conception of the whole crisis should be shaped by one's grasp of this part. In other words, the time has passed when the so-called ‘race question’ can be relegated to secondary or tertiary theoretical significance. In fact, to take seriously the multi-leveled oppression of peoples of color is to raise fundamental questions regarding the very conditions for the possibility of the modern West, the diverse forms and styles of European rationality and the character of the prevailing modern secular mythologies of nationalism, professionalism, scientism, consumerism and sexual hedonism that guide everyday practices around the world.
Earlier this month, Jules Boykoff, author of the forthcoming Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics, spoke at an SXSW panel on The Rio 2016 Olympics and the Mega-Event Machine. We present his remarks below.
I come to you from two very different backgrounds: the first is as an athlete who played at a fairly high level and really loves sports and wants it to do everything it can possibly do. I also come to you as somebody who spent August to December in Rio de Janeiro, observing how the Olympic City is changing on the ground.
I went with a real interest in talking to actual people, not just the people running the show, but people who were living favelas and being displaced by the Olympics.
The Olympic Games are in a period of immense flux. Many of the big promises about upticks in jobs and development are being cast into major doubt. These are a set of rainbows-and-unicorns assurances that have been bought with a bucket of Bitcoin. This is a real shift in the way we’ve been talking about mega-events, in the media and in the public sphere.