Preambling

This time the cover tells the whole story. What more can I add to Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s “Fuck you colonial Fucks”? What should I add? Nothing, absolutely nothing, except agreement. And circulation, share the thought, tell others. Turning writing into not writing, teaching into not teaching.

Moments in Continual Imperialist Colonial Capital Exploitation and Oppression: Letter from the Editor

Peter Trnka

Thematizing

Some of us have always been nomads. Wanderers. Spiritually, that is, intellectually, and materially, geographically. There is constant migration. Perpetual and continual. There is perpetual also colonization and recolonization. Folding the margin into the center and the centers into margins—displacement at will to rotate circuit flows. Perpetual return to originary (primitive) capital accumulation. New areas, multitudes, resources, and services. Extension and intensification of capital modes of production and exchange and life. Formal and real subsumption of labour by capital, as set out by Karl Marx (Capital Volume 1; Grundrisse) and focused in Antonio Negri (Marx Beyond Marx). Capital recapitalizes as rapidly and continually and violently as is necessary. Never speaking for anyone or anything. In expressing making a difference. Becoing invisible—education as an art of becoming invisible. Becoming, going elsewhere. Distraction, displacement. Best moments are when the teacher slinks outside or falls under the desk. A collective midwife or facilitator—architect or carpenter of platforms—shadow gatherer. Don’t attempt to set the frame for everything. Hubris of intellectuals. Instead: humility. Context. Webs of social and natural relations (peoples/groups, lands, worlds). All my relations.

Archiving

Too many moments to ever pretend to represent an adequate understanding. We’ve collected some, touching on the here and now. Where the here is a more extensively and more intensively globalized or world-wided (or widened) world and the now is an evermore hyper-manufactured, simulated, so-called synchronous “real time” impossible event with infinite sheets of repressed history and forgotten future possibility. A world with centuries-long, millennial perhaps, patterns of colonization and imperialist expansion. With accompanying racialized, gendered, classed, and otherhow socialized violence, antagonism, hatred, and killing. Altogether exploiting the multitude, the masses, the poor and downtrodden, subaltern and lumpen-proletariat, ever more increasingly the near entirety of the working-to-be-living mass of humanity. A few somewhat clear glimpses in the storm (theoretical guides). One line: Marx (Schlomo Avineri ed., Marx on Colonialism and Modernisation), V.I. Lenin (Imperialism: the Highest Stage Capitalism), Rosa Luxemburg (The Accumulation of Capital), Samir Amin (Unequal Development). Continuing a perhaps still young history of capital as a world-wide exploitation system of commodity production and exchange where imperial colonization is a constant feature at the margin, at the relatively less capitalized, less commodified border. Guides to map wandering in the storm. Thrilled with the writing, the art, the editing—so many new ways and levels of reading, new speeds and slownesses. All is on theme without much trying. Works from collective members and from new friends in northern Big Turtle Island and Malaysia. To start, however, our cover and first piece are thanks to Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, his painting “Fuck you colonial Fucks” and accompanying artist statement. Thank you Lawrence Paul, and thank you Deborah Root our Art Editor. Celeste Pedri-Spade and Brock Pitawanakwat’s “Indigenization in Universities and its Role in Continuing Settler-Colonialism” exposes the current Canadian (and more global) phenomenon of major nation-state semi-corporate institutions paying lip service to the ideology of indigenous affirmation, at the same time as closing programs, becoming more autocratic as bodies, and attempting to sequester themselves from any public accountability, scrutiny, or criticism. As Pedri-Spade and Pitawanakwat write: “Canada’s reluctance to support full self-determination of Indigenous institutions of higher education is a microcosm of the colonial control that the settler state continues to wield over Indigenous peoples” (17). The analysis is extremely current and pressing, as any semi-self-aware academic working in “socalled Canada” (to follow the Poetry Editor) should know:

A timely example of the severity of the neoliberal settler-colonial capitalist regime in Indigenous academics is the 2020/2021 closure of the Indigenous Studies program at the University of Sudbury, a federated partner of the Laurentian University. ... [T]his program was terminated during a ‘restructuring phase’ as a result of Laurentian’s insolvency filing under the Companies-Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA). This was the first time that the federal courts approved the application of this Act, intended for corporate, for-profit companies to a Canadian university. (18)

Casualties in addition to Indigenous Studies: Labour Studies, Gender Studies, Environmental and Social Justice programs, and Philosophy and Political Science (12).

Unbound’s Book Review Editor Louis Brehony’s “Genius in the People” points to prisoners groups as revolutionary vanguards by way of analysis of instrument making amongst Palestinian, Syrian, and Irish political prisoners. Instrument making—notably from gaming boards, particularly chess and backgammon—means also playing, singing along with, and all of the very many things that come with that (escape, lines of flight, song worlds, resistant artistries) in revolutionary becomings: the “revolution is a process” (47). The journal’s Poetry Editor Andreae Callanan in “Writing to right the wrongs” gives us a personal piece on autism, meltdowns, “heaving cellular grief”—cultural appropriation, story-telling, cultural and regular genocide in Canada and: “I am left asking myself: where does ‘using my privilege’ end and ‘talking for others’ begin?” (55). We then return to Palestine and Israel in Aladdin Assaiqeli, “The Ethical Cleansing of Palestine in Israeli and Palestinian Narratives”: naming, renaming, violating, and reviolating; “Colonial discourse technologists have always resorted to language to find a way to enact and sustain domination” (70). Reviews by Liam Ó Ruairc of books on the career and life of Edward Said, by Timothy Brennan among others, and Nathan Richard Williams on African sovereignty, complete our scholarly sections.

Thank you Douglas Walbourne-Gough for your poem “This All Happened?” and Public Studio for the Road Shot images. We hope always to feature more better art.

Unbinding Collectively

Thank you for your time, attention, life, work—care, thank you for your care. Solidarnosç. We are a dynamic collective—welcome Tayseer Abu Odeh, Abigail Broughton-Janes, Crystal Fraser, Md Sahidul Islam, and Krushil Watene. Thank you all, writers, artists, editors, readers, for your respect, trust, opportunity, support, solidarity, criticism. Thanks Danine Farquharson and Tahrir Hamdi for the theme of settler-colonialism and indigenous communities. We continue anti-colonial decolonization themes, variations with difference, with no predetermined telos—how community grows. Rhizomatic adventure exploration. Where and when will DISPLACEMENT, FLIGHT, MIGRATION take us in issue three? (A personal comment on Russia, or Moscow. Or a tyrant accommodating Russian political economy and a Putin. My grandfather Viktor Dobřický, on my mother Nina’s side, was from Ukraine, lived in Odessa before running from the Bolsheviks, to Prague, shortly after WWI. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 displaced myself as a four year old with my sister and parents to England. The short histories of the lives of nations.) Cosmopolitan. All my relations.