Reflections on disaster colonialism: Response to Yarimar Bonilla's ‘The wait of disaster’

After Maria, “el desastre es la colonia” became a popular hashtag in social media and was observed in graffiti and art in different parts of the country, and abroad. Yarimar Bonilla's paper continues emerging conversations amongst scholars and activists on how the colonial matrix of power is linked to the social production of disasters, and indeed, is itself a disaster. Engaging with these conversations, in this commentary I want to highlight six aspects that I consider central to a coloniality of disasters research project: necropolis and permanent war and exception; development as biocidal disaster; differential colonial vulnerabilities; climate colonialism and debt; disaster capitalism; and decolonial disaster subjectivities.     

明代中国历史趋势:帝制农商社会

Majority of contemporary Chinese historians have been employing a conceptual framework focusing on the difficulty of capitalistic development in China to analyze the historical trend and potentials of late imperial China. This approach based upon the presupposition of viewing the pattern of Chinese history as abnormal reflects with the remaining influence of the Western-centric methodology. Further, based upon a “normal” point of view, seven fundamental, irreversible, and systematical changes to the Ming society could be identified. By conclusion, China in the Ming period was transforming into an imperial agric-mercantile society. This process proves that late imperial China was not stagnate society without “history,” meanwhile, its pattern of development was clearly not identical to the Western style modernization progress. __________ Translated by Chen Cheng from Dongbei Shida Xuebao 东北师大学报(Journal of Northeast Normal University), 2007, (1): 5–13     

HISTORY AND POLITICS AS IF WE STILL LIVED IN THE HOLOCENE

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), by David Graeber and David Wengrow, is a monumental, boldly revisionist study of the human past from the last ice age to the present. It is geared explicitly toward the present in political terms and seeks to explain how primordial forms of human freedom were lost in ways that resulted in our current structures of violence and domination. The authors explore a vast range of prehistoric, ancient, and non-Western peoples to undermine (neo)evolutionist, stadial theories of long-term human development, particularly any that imply determinism, inevitability, or teleology. If so many peoples in the past were so much freer than we are today, how is it that we got stuck? And are we really as stuck as we think? Graeber and Wengrow successfully undermine the social scientific template of stage-based human development from hunter-gatherers to modern capitalist nation-states, but their book suffers from two major omissions. First, they ignore almost entirely the Anthropocene epoch and show no grasp of its implications for their analysis of the present or prospects for the future. Second, their “new history of humanity” ignores the history that is most relevant to answering their own questions about how we have arrived globally in our current structures of violence and domination: the early modern and modern history of expansionist, colonialist, capitalist, belligerent, imperialist Western European nations and their extensions since the fifteenth century. These two omissions are connected: it is disproportionately the history of the (early) modern West before and after the Industrial Revolution that explains how the planet arrived in the Anthropocene with the “Great Acceleration” around the mid-twentieth century. But heeding this history and its consequences would have undermined the authors’ upbeat political vision about our prospects for the future—essentially, a recycled Enlightenment vision about human self-determination and individual freedom that depends on environmental exploitation as if we still lived in the Holocene. For all its undoubted achievement, The Dawn of Everything neglects the history that is most salient to answering the main questions its own authors pose. What matters most about that history is not that it was inevitable but that it was actual—and that its cumulative consequences remain with us.     

朵云轩木版水印与《十竹斋书画谱》的重梓

朵云轩传统的木版水印工艺精湛绝伦,复制艺术的水平达到了形神兼备以至乱真的境地。木版水印工艺重梓精印《十竹斋画谱》并取得成功,为我国图书艺术园地继续增色添彩。     

景德镇御窑遗址出土青花绣墩的考古修复新方法研究

景德镇御窑遗址出土的15世纪中叶青花方胜纹绣墩,体量较大,器形特殊,出土时破损和缺失严重,修复难度较大。本研究通过分析传统考古修复中石膏作为补配材料的局限性,利用3D扫描打印的优势,设计采用新颖的高强度透明树脂取代传统修复补缺材料,并且结合特制的加固装置完成对大型青花绣墩的考古修复,满足了后期研究与展览的需要。本研究提出了具有一定实践意义的3D打印补配大件异形陶瓷器的修复技术路线。     

Wild Globalization: The Biopolitics of Climate Change and Global Capitalism on Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast

Abstract: This article explores the value of Deleuzoguattarian approaches for understanding the entangled relationships between globalization, climate change, capitalism and indigenous peoples. Drawing on Brett Neilson's concept of wild globalization, it analyzes the biopolitics of climate change and capitalism as they are experienced on Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast. A focus on the heterogeneous economies and ecologies of the Miskito Keys and their destruction by Hurricane Felix reveals the destabilizing forces immanent to capitalism itself. Thinking about climate change not as a transcendent teleological megahazard, but as a Body without Organs, might enable us to be schizophrenic rather than paranoid about climate change.     

后金融危机视角下对资本主义、马克思主义与社会主义的反思

席卷全球的金融危机既对资本主义社会造成很大破坏,影响十分恶劣,却也彰显出马克思主义的价值和魅力,更让社会主义透现出光明的发展前景。但这并不等于资本主义行将灭亡、社会主义取得胜利的时机已经来临。金融危机给人们提出了一系列需要更加深入反思和认识的有关资本主义与社会主义的理论与实践问题,需要确立理性看待资本主义的态度,坚定马克思主义、社会主义的信念与信心。     

A Loving Attack on Caputo’s ‘Caputolism’ and his Refusal of Communism

Abstract

For various reasons, John D. Caputo is one of my favorite philosophers. However, one may identify two basic weaknesses or contradictions when it comes to his thoughts on political economy: (1) Caputo insists on capitalism—even if it be a significantly transformed capitalism (what I will be calling here “Caputolism”)—but he does not question whether capitalism can accommodate the required reforms; and (2) Caputo’s refusal to entertain the possibility of communism as a good/better alternative to capitalism, even though he has referred to an earthly “Kingdom of God” composed of a “radical community of equals”—which (strongly) resembles communism, thus rendering his refusal of communism all the more perplexing.     

NEO‐LIBERALISM,CULTURE AND POLICY

This article looks at the hegemonic process of neo‐liberal globalisation and its implications for culture in general and cultural policy in particular from a critical perspective. A consideration of its ideological features is a necessary supplement to the economic analysis of neo‐liberal globalisation. Ideology mediates economics and culture. As it is used here, the concept of “ideology” refers to how dominant power relations and inequalities are legitimised by distorted representations of reality at various levels. While these include abstract theory and professional expertise, it is argued that everyday language and “common sense” exemplify the operations of ideology most profoundly in securing consent to prevailing and otherwise questionable arrangements. Culture is now saturated with a market‐oriented mentality that closes out alternative ways of thinking and imagining. The general argument is illustrated with several examples drawn from across the range of lived experience and institutionalised structures, especially in the arts and broadcasting. The logic of the annual European Capital of Culture competition is also discussed with reference to the neo‐liberal framework for urban regeneration. Specifically, the experience of Glasgow 1990 and the plans for Liverpool 2008 are addressed in this regard.     

Doing a Florida thing: the creative class thesis and cultural policy

In this paper, we discuss the screen media businesses and production milieu that has developed in the predominantly rural region of the Northern Rivers, Australia, over the past 20 years. Spread across a number of towns and small cities each at some distance from each other, this screen milieu would seem to go against the prevailing logic for screen media to concentrate in globally connected cities. Taking up Allen J. Scott’s suggestion that the new capitalism of the twenty-first century is producing restructuring effects in many of the interstitial spaces between large cities, this article examines the spatial assemblages of the screen media and related creative industries sectors in one such space. We demonstrate how screen media actors in this rural region are participating in the wider cultural economy and explore its cultural policy implications.