THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#17, SEPT-NOV/2015
Empire siphons away the creative intensity and insurgent potentialities of protest-as-resistance by sanctioning a rational plurality of pragmatic and emotionally cathartic ‘liberal-democratic’ opportunities for protest-as-ritual event, thereby consolidating the sovereign legitimacy and further cementing the hegemony of a western imperialist continuum.
Protest-as-resistance involves an unrepentant arrogation of sovereignty by an ascendant humanity that confronts the normative gaze of established power with an emancipatory gaze of revolt. By deliberately disrupting the accumulated simulacra of ahistorical quietism, protest-as-resistance effectively challenges, pushes back and imposes an insurgent pressure to bear upon the topographical coherence of Empire, at times liberating socio-ontological frontiers allowing for the constitutive self-determination, relentless transcendence and spiritual upheaval of human ‘being’ through emancipatory praxis.
Our contemporary era is spiritually stigmatized by a mass abdication of human agency which coalesces with an unencumbered technological fetish. And yet, are we not now bearing witness to new emancipatory dispositions of human subjectivity, being decisively reborn through an undifferentiated choice of rebellion against globalized structural-inert injustice as mediated by greater access to technology? Aren’t the same brothers and sisters engaged in diligently fitting, sealing, and wrapping waste cotton over glass bottles containing three fourths kerosene and one fourths motor oil, also communicating and organizing via the same smartphone message encryption used by the cosmopolitan capitalist elite? (1)
Have we lost such faith in our radical imagination, that we no longer recognize our own all too human face, when half covered by bandanas or folded T-shirts, leaving neo-colonial police agents with lasting impressions of our unrepentant emancipatory gaze? Why should we dismiss the courage and inspiration disclosed by our brothers and sisters who sparingly splash gasoline on those fitted glass bottles, right before igniting and choosing to constitute fresh potentialities of human subjectivity by throwing Molotov cocktails against such an overwhelming counterinsurgent deployment of neo-colonial police force? (2) These massive armed shows of force explicitly reveal counterinsurgent reconfigurations of western imperialist power, thereby potently reminding us, not only of that which persists, but also of that which is at stake, when our assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ breaches the blockade of symbolic cultural forms and engages the naked primacy of history.
A Molotov cocktail thrown against globalized structural-inert injustice breaks into flaming shards, our emancipatory inhibitions shatter along with it, and sooner or later, geonational insurrection-for-itself, like burning kerosene, resonates throughout Empire-as-western imperialist continuum, spreading by tides of fire. A rebirth of human subjectivity-as-lived universal draws nearer.
(1)Josh Halliday, “London Riots: How BlackBerry Messenger played a key role”, The Guardian (theguardian.com), August 8, 2011.
(2)Paul D. Shinkman, “Ferguson and the Militarization of Police”, U.S. News & World Report (usnews.com), August 14, 2014.
No comments:
Post a Comment