Imperial Equilibrium as Disaster by A. Shahid Stover

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#25, SEPT-NOV/2017

As the globalized administrative personality of Empire gradually unhinges, while repeatedly shifting horizontally between structural-inert poles of neocolonial and colonial orientations, temptations to foreclose insurgent philosophical discourse into oppositional frameworks of partisan political maneuvering within each respective nationally appropriate paradigm of the imperial mainstream gather momentum. This horizontal Spectacle of oppositional electoral gamesmanship between neo-liberal, neo-conservative, and neo-fascist rhetoric, aims towards ideologically undermining imperatives of Revolt which challenge and confront western imperialist power from a position of vertical insurgency arising out of the socio-ontological underground of modernity.

The disaster which engulfs the wretched of the earth consists in a merciless geohistorical continuity of western imperialist power which drowns the ascendant humanity of Black community in objective violence and miseducation of soul. As such, ongoing crises in the administration of capital and the preservation of hegemony within the imperial mainstream are openings towards potentialities of emancipatory praxis. Indeed, the question which haunts the radical imagination is not whether the cost of ‘protest-as-resistance’ and spontaneous rebellion is becoming too steep, but rather, whether the ongoing price of ‘protest-as-ritual event’ has taken too much of an existential toll on lived potentialities of human agency towards insurrection-for-itself?

For even when contemporary neo-fascist elements undertake ‘democratic’ seizures of the nation-state apparatus, is not the naked face of Empire unveiled without prestige? And yet, has it not been under this very prestige that the inherent poverty of oppositional thought also finds comfort and shelter? Indeed, regardless of which faction of the ruling power elite wields the administrative apparatus of the nation-state, Black community-as-ascendant humanity remains exposed to coloniality in the Raw as an unremitting violence of socio-historical oppression that is regulated and maintained by the civic stability of imperial society.

And yet, what exactly should be understood by mainstream fluctuations in the outward geopolitical personality of Empire throughout the standard bearing metropoles of imperial civil society? As the contemporary international crisis of immigrants and refugees discloses an approaching horizon of geonational imperatives, are there signs that a more structurally fundamental transition is taking place in the globalized relations between a western imperialist continuum and the wretched of the earth?